Nier: Automata was always going to be an unusual game. For many fans, it was an alchemic combination made in heaven: visionary game director Yoko Taro, known for his enthralling but often technically broken games, and the production company of Platinum Games, known for slick, stylish action games, a partner capable of making Taro's vision as exciting to play as it was to think about. That the game was a sequel to NieR, one of Taro's most beloved (and bizarre) titles? Even better.

"Platinum has a lot of experience developing titles, both our own and those based on other people's properties," says Takahisa Taura, a designer at Platinum. It's March, and I'm speaking with him and Taro at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, nearly a year after Nier: Automata was released. "But this was the first time we were able to work with the person who created that IP. It was a really fresh experience to be able to work with someone who already knows everything about that IP and have them take us to where we need to be."

Taro, sipping on a Diet Coke, agree, calling it "the easiest collaboration I've ever done." The designer has been working in the games industry for nearly 20 of his 47 years, and is no stranger to more tenuous collaborations; nearly every company he's worked for has struggled with small budgets and heavy oversight. Cavia, the company where he made Drakengard, his first major title as director, produced mostly tie-in games before the original NieR proved to be its swan song.

As a creator, Taro has an undeniable mystique. He's famously shy, and doesn't like having his picture taken. In most public appearances, he wears a mask fashioned after the smiling moon-like face of No. 7 from Nier, one of his most famous characters. The eerie visage lends him an impish quality. Without his mask, though, milling about the GDC press room and answering my questions with a warm, soft-spoken tone, he appears somewhat like the Wizard of Oz: waiting behind the curtain, eager to answer questions but weary, perhaps, of being in costume for so long.

And that demand, for Taro's ideas and presence, has only increased in the past year. Nier: Automata sold two million units in its first year, a success beyond expectations, and won a bevy of awards and accolades, including being named WIRED's Game of the Year. Some of that is because of its surprising accessibility: It looks and feels like a Platinum Games project, densely packed and ambitious, but unlike Platinum's most famous works, it isn't heavily technical or challenging.

That was no accident. "When I was most aware of when creating [Nier: Automata] was players who aren't as good at playing games or maybe don't even play games at all," said Taro. "I wanted to keep in mind those players who may just buy the game by looking at the package. If they bring that game home and try to play it and they just can't, then it's not satisfactory for them. I didn't want that to happen. I wanted to cater to the casual players who maybe just happened to pick up the game."

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On the easiest difficulty, a set of equipment available to the player character even automates combat entirely, removing any barrier between the player and progress. "If you can skip through event cutscenes [in a game], then why can't you just skip through the gameplay?" asks Taura. "Why not do both?"

With those decisions in place, Automata is a perfect entry point to the dark, weird worlds Taro's work is known for, which all take place in a loose continuity spanning multiple timelines and thousands of years. In the present of Automata, the year is 11,945. An army of man-made androids, their creators absent, fight an army of alien-built machines for control of a ruined Earth. As androids 2B, 9S, and later A2, the player wrestles with the horrors of warfare without purpose and a constant cycle of digitized death and rebirth. If most post-apocalyptic stories ask what happens to us as the world ends, Nier: Automata asks what happens to the objects and ideologies we leave behind.