Nier Automata's effortlessly eccentric director Yoko Taro has said he originally made games with multiple endings at a time when short games were out of fashion. Now? He reckons making games with 100 endings, like Danganronpa creator's new game, is a risky move.
In the latest issue of Famitsu Magazine, the Nier mastermind sat down for a chat with Danganronpa's Kazutaka Kodaka and 999 director Koutarou Uchikoshi, who recently teamed up to release strategy RPG The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, a dangerous high school-set game that has seemingly countless routes to complete.
Nier Automata's 26 routes were a major deal when the game first released – even though most of them were joke endings. But Taro explains in quotes translated by Redditor ComunCoutinho and Google Translate that he only added multiple routes to his Drakengard series for the extra replayability.
You see, for most of the 2000s, a game's length was somewhat used to measure whether it was worth the price. In 2025, with dozens of games competing for our time every single month, a 500-hour epic doesn't seem as appealing.
"In the current year, making something with 100 different routes and endings is the more dangerous play," Taro tells the developers of The Hundred Line, which has roughly 100 routes and endings.
That's not an idea that put the developers off, though. Uchikoshi apparently created a flowchart containing all 100 routes to show Kodaka how rash his initial idea was, but seeing everything physically laid out apparently got the famed visual novel maestro more motivated to do it.
Kodaka is at least aware of the gamble he took. He recently said that he'd love to port The Hundred Line to more consoles, but the studio is still "on the brink of going under," which isn't a surprise considering the team ended up with a lot of debt trying to create the ambitious genre-bending hybrid in the first place.
Yoko Taro says Nier: Automata has so many endings because "Square Enix told us" to "add more content"
