Yoko Taro, born on June 6, 1970, in Nagoya, Aichi, Japan, is a renowned Japanese video game director and scenario writer, credited with masterminding the Drakengard franchise.
Raised mostly by his influential grandmother due to his parents’ work obligations, Taro was deeply impacted by an incident from his youth, which later influenced his work as a scenario writer.
After graduating from Kobe Design University, he initially worked as a 3D CGI designer for Namco before joining second party Sony Computer Entertainment.
His journey in the gaming industry took off at the game company Cavia, where he contributed to the Drakengard series.
In 2015, Taro announced the establishment of his own company, Bukkoro, partnering with his wife Yukiko and Hana Kikuchi, a novelist and scenario writer.
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With credits on 17 games, including NieR: Automata and SINoALICE, Taro’s life was depicted in a 2021 biographical manga titled “Verified Game Creator Biography: Yoko Taro Chapter.”
Top 5 Yoko Taro Quotes
What I really love about philosophers and psychologists is that they sound smart. ~ Yoko Taro.
In ‘Drakengard’, you have magic and non-magic missiles that couldn’t shoot each other down. ~ Yoko Taro.
I don’t want to alter their perception of the game by seeing who I am. ~ Yoko Taro.
When I’m able to eat cheap and delicious food, like ramen and beef bowls, I can’t stop but to think, ‘Ah, what a great era I was born in.’ ~ Yoko Taro.
The reason my games are chaotic is that the world is chaotic, not me. I don’t aim for bad endings – they just naturally come out. ~ Yoko Taro.
Powerful amous Yoko Taro Quotes
I personally don’t feel like I’m really different with the mask on or not, but I don’t really like to take interviews or go talk to other people in or in front of other people. ~ Yoko Taro.
I have liked games for a very long time but when I saw ‘Gradius’ at the arcade as a high school student, I became certain that in the future, all forms of entertainment will be taken over by video games. ~ Yoko Taro.
My belief is that if there are already games that other developers are putting out that are satisfying to the player, with great action or an excellent story, then I desire to create something different – a different type of experience. ~ Yoko Taro.
Personally, I don’t want to be regarded as that one person who’s responsible for the title. Of course, I do understand where it’s coming from, because I am the director of the game, and I did work on the last title as well. But the people who are actually making this game are the younger developers at Platinum, so I want to shine the spotlight on them. ~ Yoko Taro.
I don’t think that humankind is worthy of trust when we can’t let go of war, draw borders between neighboring countries, seek to become richer than others, find joy in defeating others in sports, and choose someone of the opposite gender based on their appearance. ~ Yoko Taro.
To be honest, I think I am making normal games targeted towards normal people. But ultimately, when I release those normal games, weird people find them to be weird games and enjoy them. Which probably means there’s something wrong with me. ~ Yoko Taro.
My true goal is, I believe, that directors can do more than just make a game. I think we can find new possibilities within games, and I believe that is the core of the job. ~ Yoko Taro.
I could go on forever if I started to list the games that I liked, but the title that made me want to make games myself was ‘Gradius’. ~ Yoko Taro.
Famous Yoko Taro Quotes
Whenever I write the scenarios for my games, I don’t necessarily envision them being liked or being wonderful for everyone. ~ Yoko Taro.
The reason why there are so many characters who suffer in my games is that I want to show reality. ~ Yoko Taro.
For ‘Nier: Automata’, I wasn’t told to target anyone. I just made what I wanted to, and I tried to stay hidden from Square Enix as much as possible. ~ Yoko Taro.
When you really think about it, it doesn’t really matter where a game ends. Ultimately, if the player is satisfied with stopping at a particular point, it doesn’t matter if it’s where the creator intended things to end or not… and so that’s where the idea of having so many endings came about. ~ Yoko Taro.
In any case, ‘Nier: Automata’ is not a perfect game. But I am proud of everything in it. ~ Yoko Taro.
In the original Nier, there was the story of the wolf and the people with the masks. I remember crying along with the story as I was writing it while I was completely wasted. ~ Yoko Taro.
Best Yoko Taro Quotes
After we released ‘Drakengard 3’, I think everyone was well sick of all the games I made by then, and I really didn’t really want to work anymore. I was thinking I’d probably just go and hide in the mountains and live out the rest of my life as a hermit or something. ~ Yoko Taro.
You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I’ve decided to create stories through video games. ~ Yoko Taro.
I’ve already gotten many questions asking about why I chose fairy tales as a theme, so I’m pretty exhausted. So I’d like to quickly summarize my answer, which is ‘I want a lot of money.’ ~ Yoko Taro.
Most intelligent developers would be talking statistics on that and find out the metrics; but as you may know, I’m quite an idiot, so I don’t do that kind of thing. I think rather than knowing which decision players finally took in the end, the important thing is simply having the choice and making that decision. ~ Yoko Taro.
As for my favorite games growing up, if I were to mention a game other than ‘Gradius’, it would have to be ‘Xervious’. ~ Yoko Taro.
The theme on the overall Nier team, though, is if you’ll give us money, we’ll basically do whatever you want. ~ Yoko Taro.
Speaking seriously, ‘Ikaruga’ influenced how I synchronize the game sequences with the music. Combining the two in a way that appeals to people’s hearts is a task that’s quite difficult. ~ Yoko Taro.
I felt that just looking at the world in general, there are so many types of people, and some hide who they truly are. And I feel that every person has some kind of warped identity inside them that they decide if they want to show or not. ~ Yoko Taro.
It’s almost like the game is a slave to the music in a lot of ways. The emotions that are created in the players themselves are [a result of the music] and the game just sort of follows along behind that. ~ Yoko Taro.
Popular Yoko Taro Quotes
So ‘Nier Automata’ feels like a story about androids but no, the main theme of ‘Automata’ is human. ~ Yoko Taro.
I’ve always felt that it didn’t feel right for me when a protagonist goes through a storyline where they’re killing a lot of enemies, and at the very end of the story he ends up kissing the heroine, and that’s where you end the game. ~ Yoko Taro.
I feel that a world in which you only see what you want to see is incomplete. And as a game creator, I am only here to prepare a game that will expand the breadth of your thinking, and leave the decision between good and evil up to the players. ~ Yoko Taro.
I drink beer, white wine, and whiskey soda. People don’t believe me when I say so, but I buy the cheapest one available at the supermarket. ~ Yoko Taro.
I used to play at arcades every day from a young age. At that time, video games were considered to be something that delinquents played. ~ Yoko Taro.
I love alcohol. But these days, I can feel my body breaking apart from it, so I usually drink diet coke. I drink around three liters a day. Of course, I still mix a bit of alcohol in here and there. ~ Yoko Taro.
There are multiple teams within Platinum, but the specific team I worked with, Team Taura, is really young and powerful and they’re very talented in going through a lot of volume of work at a really fast pace. ~ Yoko Taro.
Other Yoko Taro Quotes
Personally, I don’t like going out in public. I know that doing interviews and appearances is one of the main ways to get information across to players, but when I do it, I’m careful not to distract too much from the game. I feel that a developer should let their game speak for itself. ~ Yoko Taro.
For ‘Nier: Automata’, Square Enix kind of ordered me to promote the game, and I actually had a little bit of a quarrel with our producer, Mr. Saito, about not wanting to do it. After many discussions and arguments, we ended up with the mask. So, I gave in with that condition. ~ Yoko Taro.
I kind of want to continue to fail, because it’s easier for me to think of what I want to do next. Whereas if I succeed, I might have to follow that path. ~ Yoko Taro.
If there are 100 people, I don’t anticipate all 100 liking my scenario – but I write it so at least one or two of them will love and get really into that particular story. ~ Yoko Taro.
For me, when we’re all human beings, it’s just interesting that we cannot understand the other person or how they think. That’s one part of the human aspect that fascinates me. ~ Yoko Taro.
I try to be myself, even with the mask on, but I also try to be careful that I don’t break the image that other people might have of me and I try to keep things light, I guess. ~ Yoko Taro.
So these were the 50 top quotes about Yoko Taro.
