summary by Defade
original source: http://www.famitsu.com/game/news/1235592_1124.html
Origin of Nier:
-SE producer Saitou originally wanted to make an epic RPG like the FF & SO series, but sometime during development, he changed his mind to "Let's make a 'very very' action-based game".
-Yooko thought that Saitou still wanted an RPG, so he didn't take that comment to heart.
Stuff comes out, you kill it. If I make a game like that, it could somehow fit into both genres...if I aimed for an action game from the start, the results might've been different. The fact that NieR has Towns is a testament to that fact.
-Since we did our worst(tn:worst as in the situations the characters encounter, not the actual writing quality) in terms of plotline in DOD, we thought we'd do something different for NieR.
About Ending D:
-Yooko had the concept of save file deletion early on in development, but thought it'd be immediately rejected and shut up about it. Later when he told the committee of his idea, reception was a lot more positive than expected.
-He wanted to make a 'strange game', so he didn't particularly fear the players' responses this and expected their opinions to be on two extreme sides. However, most people seemed fine with it, so he's both happy and confused. He thought that more people would stop playing at Ending A, but a lot of them actually continued to D. The comments of players overseas though, were pretty much what he expected, be it good or bad.
-He thought one comment on NieR, that it was 'an ugly puppy', described the game perfectly. It's full of flaws and sometimes you just can't bear to look at it, but there's a certain charm about it that you just can't let go of.
Secrets of the NieR world:
-Father Nier's birthday is 9/11, the release date for DOD. Brother Nier's birthday, 6/6, was a placeholder they forgot to change. However, some people said that it was Brother Day, and Yooko just took that as the official settng.
-1300 years later vs. 1400 years later. To counter the widespread disease, souls - Gestalts - were pulled out of bodies and put into Replicants. By changing the role of the Replicant, they can ensure the repeated survival of their souls. Replicant and Gestalt are not parallel worlds. But are distinct patterns in an ever-repeating world. The main character and Yonah are sometimes siblings, and sometimes father and daughter.
The difference in time changes reflects that.
-The story told in NieR is actually the second part of the settings I came up with, and the amount of deleted content in the first part is enough to fill up two games.
-Back then, there were many copies of Grimoire Noir. GN was required for the Gestalt
process, but back then there were no recorded cases of success, so many people were given copies of GN in hopes of running into a succesful case - maybe if they replicated the process of the successful case, they might consistently get good results. It was pretty much a large-scale human experiment. In the opening, Nier became the first case of successful Gestalt-fication, and the shades that attacked him were all failures. In hopes of helping Nier, Yonah also touched the GN, but...
-Success is when a human could keep their consciousness after going through the Gestalt process - like the mother & child Shades seen in the second playthrough.
-Actually, No.7 is a male that likes other males, but I was pretty surprised that it didn't carry over as well as I thought. Kaine's initital design was much more conservative as well, and Nier was originally designed with nobility in mind, but it just seems so out of place in his world, so they redesigned him.
-All the grimoires were originally human, there are a total of 13 books. All of them are humans who went through the Gestalt process and had their souls sealed in books.
Game system:
-I wanted to make a strange game. So I mixed many different genres together. But it seems like the oversease reaction to sound novels were rather negative...apparently they don't like reading much. Unlike Japan, they don't even have the culture of sound novels.
-The mansion level was too close to the game we were imitating, so we had to change it up a bit. (laughs) Neither Emil nor the butler are human, and they won't age.
So to reflect time standing still, I gave the mansion a monochrome color palette.
-Yooko was surprised that the programmers even added a drift system to the boar, but he liked it so it was kept. Young Nier moves a bit slower than father Nier or older Nier, because he has shorter legs.
-The enemies' strength on easy or normal won't change in any playthrough, but in hard, they get stronger according to Nier's level. However, word and item drop rates have gone up.
-Bosses and words were named after fairytales because of Nier's original plot. The basic premise is this: the world within picture books actually exist, and the heroes have to defeat the villains that came from the picture book. They were trying to revive their leader, so the heroes wanted to stop them. However, they have their own reasons. In the world of picture books, the same story is repeated over and over again, and the villains are doomed to be evil forever, and to suffer their punishment for eternity. A certain scientist realized this and tried to free them, but was defeated by the heroes. So, the villains tried to revive him, but of course, the heroes won't allow that.
-Music in this game was inspired by some shooting games that Yooko played, and the composer was friends with him since their university days. I was slightly irritated that many users rated the music higher than the game.(laughs)
Donwloadable contents part doesn't offer anything new, so I didn't bother summarizing it.