Nier Creator Yoko Taro Has No Regrets — Yet Says He Never Felt He Fully Finished Anything
He’s sculpting worlds, not just writing code—molding mechanics like clay, trimming the excess, and firing only what holds its shape.
Yoko Taro is not chasing perfection so much as trying to call time on the endless tinkering. In a new conversation with Archipel, the NieR and Drakengard creator said he doesn’t really do regrets, but he also doesn’t think he’s ever made the thing he sees in his head. Classic Taro: oddly comforting and a little bleak.
The cube Taro keeps chasing
Taro likens storytelling to sculpting a cube out of clay. You get it into shape, step back, notice one face is off, fix it, then realize another side looks wrong. Repeat forever.
"I would say that building a story is like making a cube out of clay."
It’s a very inside-baseball way to describe development, but it tracks. The work is iterative and never really done; the only reason it ships is because a deadline finally tells you to put the clay down.
Deadlines, acceptance, and a little sadness
Once the clock runs out, he doesn’t pretend everything is perfect. He says your feelings about a finished game keep shifting afterward. He’s never had the sensation of crafting a perfect scenario, but after some distance he can at least feel like he put in the necessary effort. If he had infinite time and money, he’d keep polishing forever. Since that’s not real life, you stop, live with the crooked edges, and there’s a bit of sadness when you can’t touch it anymore.
No recycling, start over
Here’s the part that might surprise people who love combing through his leftovers: he doesn’t want to carry discarded ideas into the next thing. No salvaging the cut bits. He’d rather reset to zero and try to make the cube right from scratch again.
Regrets? Not really
Looking back, he says he doesn’t feel regret about what he should have done differently. At the same time, he also doesn’t feel like he ever fully completed anything. The work feels more like an ongoing task than a checked box. It’s a very Taro answer: not tortured, just pragmatic.
Automata was meant to be confusing (on purpose)
If you played NieR: Automata and thought, wow, this is purposefully slippery—yeah, that was the point. Taro says he aimed for a story he himself would have trouble fully grasping, and he intentionally pushed it to be more confusing than NieR Replicant. That was the goal, not a happy accident.