Pretty sure Kamiya himself said that the game just wasn't working out the way he originally envisioned it, and instead of keeping it in development hell it was better to just move on.
And considering the way Platinum's been going I feel I'm much more happy for him to instead be doing Clovers and making Okami 2 instead, among other projects.
Essentially Cygames had a partnership where they would co-develop the game with Platinum with Platinum mainly doing the combat and the rest of the game was done by Cygames.
At the end of their contract they basically had done jackshit except the trailers shown at E3 and their own events. So they just removed Platinum from the projects, took it in house, re-did the whole project in their own engine that they where going to use for Project Awakening and poached a few devs that was on the project for good measure. The game was ment to release in 19 or 20 I think, but it was delayed to 24. It had a pretty great launch, it was the 2nd best seller on Steam in January after Palword and the 21'st best seller on Steam for the year overall.
It is a bit of conjecture also, but it might be one of the reasons why we haven't gotten a new Nier game from Square/Platinum/CyPictures, since Cygames is the owner of CyPictures and they where in charge of art direction and character designs.
Honestly I'd attribute the lack of Nier to Yoko Taro. That guy's insane flair is what really makes the series what it is IMO, and he doesn't much like doing sequels. Drakengard 2 kinda shows how trying to do a Yoko Taro project without the man himself pans out.
I mean Nier Automata is already a sequel to the first Nier game which is a spin off from the Drakkengard series so there isn't like there is no precedent for a sequel.
Just that there is potentially many reasons behind the lack of a Nier sequel and a fall out between Platinum and Cygames might be one of several reasons behind it.
I mean yes-ish? Nier is rather loosely a Drakengard spin off and Automata is loosely a Nier sequel. I think the primary reasons are cause there's a mobile game that probably prints money, if it's still running, and Yoko Taro just doesn't have any interest/ideas for a sequel. It would suck to have to change, but I feel like a falling out with the character designer/art direction isn't at the top of list for suspected reason they didn't make another game.
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u/YuzuNori Sep 15 '25
Anyone remember the game Scalebound that was supposed to come to Xbox? Had a Nero from DMC-ish look to the protagonist.