Yoko Taro

Yoko Taro (横尾 太郎) is a Japanese video game director and scenario writer.

Starting his career at the now-defunct game company Cavia, his best-known work was on the action role-playing video game series Drakengard, and its spin-offs, Nier and Nier: Automata.

Yoko Taro was born in Nagoya, Aichi, on June 6, 1970.

Taro's parents were often absent from home due to their jobs, so he was mostly raised by his grandmother, who left a strong impression on him.

During his youth, he heard about an incident that would influence his later work as a scenario writer: while an acquaintance was in a shopping street with a group of friends, one of them who was walking along a high building roof slipped and died from the fall.

The scene as Yoko heard it was initially "horrifying", but included a humorous element as well.

Yoko was born in Nagoya, Aichi, and studied at the Kobe Design University in the 1990s.

While he did not initially intend to pursue a career in video games, after working at Namco and Sony, he joined Cavia and became the director and scenario writer for the first Drakengard game.

He has since worked extensively on every game in the series (except Drakengard 2), and on mobile titles, after becoming a freelancer after Cavia's absorption into AQ Interactive.

Critics have noted Yoko's unconventional game design and writing style.

One of the main aspects of his work is exploring the darker aspects of people, such as why they are driven to kill each other, although he typically does not share a common opinion on his story's dark natures.

His writing technique, described as "backwards scriptwriting", involves outlining the ending of the story first and building the narrative backward from that point.

Due to his disdain for being photographed, he generally wears a mask when giving interviews or presenting games.

He studied at Kobe Design University and graduated in March 1994.

He is married to Yukiko Yoko, an illustrator who worked on Taiko no Tatsujin series and also did work on Drakengard 3.

Initially not intending to pursue a career in video games, his first job a month after graduating was as a 3D CGI designer for Namco.

In 1999, he joined Sugar & Rockets Inc., a now-defunct in-house developer owned by Sony Computer Entertainment.

In 2001, a year after Sugar & Rockets' consolidation by Sony, Yoko got a job at Cavia.

While working at Cavia, he became involved in the creation of Drakengard.

While the game's co-producer Takuya Iwasaki intended to take the director's role, he was busy with other projects, so Yoko was asked to take up director's duties.

He also helped create the scenario and characters, as well as co-writing the script with Sawako Natori.

During its production, Yoko was unhappy with the amount of changes asked for by the game's advisory board.

It got to the point where he decided he would not work on another Drakengard.

He was later involved in the production of Drakengard 2, being credited as a video editor while also remaining as one of the game's creative staff.

Mostly tied up with another project during production, his original concept for the game as an arcade-style game with dragons in space was vetoed and he had creative clashes with the game's new director Akira Yasui.

After Drakengard 2 was completed, Yoko started work on a third entry in the series.

As the game developed, the initial concept was developed to the point where the game was rebranded as Nier, a spin-off from the series.

Despite this, Yoko continued to consider it the third entry in the series.

After Nier was released and Cavia was absorbed into AQ Interactive, Yoko left the company and pursued an independent career.

During this period, he took an unknown role in the development of Square Enix's social game Monster × Dragon.

The majority of his freelancer work involved social mobile games.

Many years later, Yoko teamed back up with multiple staff from the production of Drakengard and Nier to create a true second sequel to Drakengard, determining through questionnaires that the main appeal to the fanbase was the dark stories.

After the completion of Drakengard 3, Yoko "went back into unemployment".

After that, he began writing a short-term special column for Famitsu titled "Taro Yoko's Circle of No Good Thinking".

In 2015, Yoko announced that he had started his own company called Bukkoro, staffed by Yoko, his wife Yukiko, and Hana Kikuchi, novelist and scenario writer for Nier and Drakengard 3.

His other works include the 2023 anime television series based on Nier: Automata titled Nier: Automata Ver1.1a, co-writing the script with the anime's director Ryouji Masuyama.

Yoko has stated his intense dislike of interviews.

His reason, according to his Famitsu column, was that he feels video game developers are not entertainers or commentators on their work and that he thinks the subjects they talk about in interviews would be overly boring to those reading or listening.

When he does give interviews, he prefers to wear a mask to avoid being photographed, and in a video interview concerning Drakengard 3, he used a glove puppet.

He has also stated that he likes to be blunt when stating his opinions, as he feels that video game fans deserve truth and honesty.