In a recent interview with AV Watch, Sony and PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida talked about the difficulty Japanese games once faced in gaining recognition in the global market, highlighting Square Enix’s NieR: AutomatA as the “game that changed everything,” reviving Japan’s game industry and inspiring Japanese creators to stop imitating the West. Nier’s director Yoko Taro and producer Yosuke Sato responded to Yoshida’s praise, giving insight into how they approached Nier’s development.
Despite the critical and commercial success Japanese games and creators are seeing today, in the late 2000s to the mid-2010s, this was not the case. According to Yoshida, when games in the West started becoming more realistic and “Hollywood-style,” there came a time (during the PS3 era) when Japanese creators, wanting to produce global hits, consciously strove to appeal to “overseas tastes.” But with there being no original context to these games, they received poor reception in the Western market.
However, Yoshida noted, everything changed in 2017, with the release of Nier: Automata on PS4. “I think Yoko Taro created it without paying any mind at all to making it sell overseas, but it was a tremendous success.”
After Nier: Automata, more and more titles came to prove that if Japanese creators made Japanese-style games, they would sell overseas. “With Nier, everyone realized this. That it wasn’t just something they could do, but something they had to do.” In this way, Yoshida explained, Japanese creators moved away from the tendency of imitating what overseas studios were doing and strove to “create based on their own culture and what they knew,” realizing that gamers overseas understood their work.
“I think that the Japanese game industry revived after Nier, so much so that you could talk about pre-Nier and post-Nier eras. Simply put, I think that was the title that made everyone want to pursue Japanese-style games,” Yoshida commented.
Over on X, Yoko Taro thanked Yoshida for the praise, however, he noted that it was Nier: Automata’s producer Yosuke Saito who “ordered” him to make a game “that targets the Japanese market, without worrying about overseas reviews.”
“Or, to put it more precisely,” Yoko Taro adds, “I remember being told something like ‘Yoko, you can’t make games for overseas, so (at least) try to make it for Japan.”
Yoko used some strong words like “ordered” and added a self-deprecating note to his retelling of what happened, but Nier’s producer Sato responded to correct him a bit, commenting, “What I said at the time went more like this: Since we’re Japanese people, there’s no need for us to go out of our way to cater to people overseas. Surely, we’ll be able to attract at least a million players among all the people out there who genuinely want to play a Japanese game made by a Japanese person (the one and only Yoko Taro).”
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