Yoko Taro has grown in popularity in recent years due to his work on the Drakengard and NieR series. The eccentric, Japanese video game creator is known for wearing an iconic helmet over his face that has a big somewhat creepy smile and huge eyes. Even though the series has been around for a while, it never quite reached its peak until the sales success that was NieR: Automata. And now, fans of Taro's work will be happy to know that he's working on a new, unannounced video game.
Square Enix is set to launch NieR Replicant in just a few short days on modern consoles and Yoko Taro is once again the lead writer on the project. Yosuke Saito also returns as the producer of the remaster, but it turns out that the two men are working together once again on a download-only game that is still very much under wraps.
According to a tweet from a reliable video game Twitter source, @Nibellion, Yoko Taro and Yosuke Saito will be working together on a new game that won't be releasing in a physical format that will apparently "feel nostalgic but also fresh." The news comes from an article over at GamesTalk, a Japanese site for video game news that covered a recent NieR livestream. Taro also explained during the livestream that the download-only title is hard to explain to people, and he doesn't even know how he will sell it to people. He also mentions that it's mysterious and more information will be coming in a few days.
Being a download-only title could mean anything in this day and age of video games. Taro could be working on a game that's exclusive to a platform such as Apple Arcade or Google Stadia, or it could just be a digital game released on modern consoles like PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. There are no concrete details just yet on what it'll be coming to, but fans will certainly have more info coming to them in the next two weeks or so.
There's definitely a chance for it to head to Apple's subscription service, as one other famed Japanese developer has been using it to their advantage. JRPG legend Hironobu Sakaguchi, known for the creation of the Final Fantasy series, has recently launched a new IP titled Fantasian to the service and it received mostly positive reviews from fans and critics alike. There's definitely room in the mobile market for a game with similar NieR-like themes to hit the mobile market.
Some fans might be disappointed that Yoko Taro's secret game isn't going to be a full-fledged release, but smaller games can still be successful if done right.
Source: GamesTalk