NieR: Automata director Yoko Taro wrote about the crises in Gaza and Ukraine, among other things, in a heartfelt year-end letter, “Looking back to 2023, the world was too cruel”.

NieR: Automata is a game about despair in the face of life and the search for meaning in a meaningless world. But in the end it’s also about finding that meaning and humanity in each other. And along that message, director Yoko Taro shared a heartfelt end-of-year letter to urge change in the face of Russia’s continuing invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s escalating attacks in Gaza.

“Looking back to 2023, the world was too cruel, wasn’t it? The war in Ukraine is not over yet, and a new war is starting in Gaza,” Taro writes in a statement published on 4Gamer and translated by machine learning. “According to UNICEF, more than 5,300 children have died in 46 days.”

According to a fuller translation by Gosokkyu, the famed director mentioned on the co-host that he felt utterly useless thinking back on these statistics, but in these dark moments he remembered a story from his youth when his friend gave him advice on courting girls. Essentially, his friend said it was a numbers game. If you have a 1% success rate of asking someone out – you simply have to do it 100 times.

In a pragmatic twist, Taro then tries to reframe the feeling of powerlessness into a similar probability game, asking all readers to think about how they could solve their ongoing crises – at least for a minute. If thousands make some effort to end the senseless violence, Taro hopes these conflicts can end. “If there are 100 people, that’s 100 minutes. If there are 1000 people, that’s 1000 minutes,” says Taro. “Someone can figure something out. That’s what I was thinking about today.”

Source: GamesRadar