Yoko Taro Sheds Some Light on His 7-Part Character Creation Process

NieR creator Yoko Taro gave a talk on character design and scenario writing at the SEA Summit in Singapore last month, where he said a lot about the process he uses to creates characters! It can be broken down into 7 key things for consideration.

 

 

Here’s some details from 4Gamer‘s report of the event:

 

Yoko Taro said the first thing he thinks about is ‘budget’, and then ‘length of time’. If you already know these two things, most problems can be solved. The third step is knowing the ‘market’ to get an idea of what’s in demand right now. Is it a battle action game, or an RPG? After that comes ‘balance’, where things like the number of characters and gender ratio are considered. 100 characters would be difficult on a budgetary basis, so around 3 to 5 would be better.

 

Next up is the ‘fans’. This is where Yoko Taro considers whether it would be good to have a character from a past work reappear. It’s also important to ‘betray the fans’ expectations’ and do something unexpected. Following this, it’s important to think about the ‘game content’. Having a character with four arms in a battle game could be fun, but it costs more to do something like that.

 

The final part is ‘drama’. This is the characters’ personalities, as well as elements such as hair colour and costumes. ‘Drama’ might be what first comes to mind when you think of creating characters, but it’s actually the last step. It’s better to make sure you satisfy all the other requirements before you go through with this stage. For example, you might come up with something for ‘drama’ and then realise you can’t go through with it because of the budget, and you’d end up not making the character you wanted. Once you’ve met the necessary conditions, you can come up with ideas freely.

 

Yoko Taro Sheds Some Light on His 7-Part Character Creation Process

That’s the process! It seems like such a neat and simple way of doing things when you think about it! It’s always interesting to get a glimpse into the weird and wonderful mind of Yoko Taro too!

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