Documentarian group Archipel has announced a book featuring a series of interviews with Nier creator Yoko Taro, launching on Kickstarter next month.
If you ask me, Archipel is one of the best channels on YouTube if you're into Japanese games. It's relatively under the radar with only 328K subscribers, but it arguably makes some of the highest-quality videos on the site. This is helped by its access to legendary creators from Japan like Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, Daytona USA musician Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, and developers like Shinji Mikami, Daisuke Ishiwatari, Toshihiro Nagoshi, and Katsura Hashino.
One of the channel's recent subjects was Nier creator Yoko Taro, whom the channel also released a video about in 2017, just after the launch of Nier Automata – and while that was eight years ago now, Archipel has teamed up with Taro again for a book launch.
Announced on the Archipel Patreon, The Wor[l]ds of Yoko Taro is set to launch on Kickstarter in "early September" this year. The book is described as "an in-depth look at the writing and world-building that characterizes Yoko Taro's style," and will include "a series of interviews we conducted with Drakengard and NieR series creator Yoko Taro" from their first encounter in 2017 with him until now.
And if you're not entirely familiar with Taro, it's still worth getting excited about. The creator of Nier is the man who says, "I have zero charisma," but he's typically full of it. And even among the crypticism and irony, he does clearly have a great knowledge of the industry, too.
The Kickstarter page is live now, but doesn't feature much in the way of information or even the crowdfunding goal. You'll be able to get notifications of when it does launch on the platform, though, which is sometime next month.
