Yoko Taro and Keisuke Okabe Talk Stress-Driven Design at The Tenth Mosaic
The session put two design philosophies side by side: Okabe treats a hit's commercial gravity as a constraint that now binds what the ENDER series can attempt, while Taro treats strong games in a genre as closed problems he no longer needs to solve.
Key Facts
- The Tenth Mosaic ran on September 22 and 23, 2026 at the Institut francais de Tokyo in Tokyo.
- Keisuke Okabe directs ENDER LILIES and ENDER MAGNOLIA and works at Live Wire, a group company of Adglobe alongside BINARY HAZE.
- Okabe said each ENDER title is made by a team of 20 or fewer people on a budget capped near 500 million yen, taking three to four years.
- Okabe said he expected ENDER LILIES to sell between 10,000 and 50,000 copies.
- Yoko Taro directed NieR:Automata and served as MC for the talk session.
Reporting from 1 source: Denfaminicogamer.
Yoko Taro, director of NieR:Automata, and Keisuke Okabe, director of ENDER LILIES and ENDER MAGNOLIA, held a one-hour talk session at The Tenth Mosaic, a game culture event at the Institut francais de Tokyo in Tokyo on September 22 and 23, 2026. Taro served as MC and drew out Okabe on the making of the ENDER series. Okabe described a method he calls "stress-driven development": when envy of a strong game sets in, he plays a Steam title with Mixed user reviews to rebuild his confidence, then studies its missteps for his own work. He said he picks such games when the store page pitch reads well but the ratings do not. Taro said he never feels envy and described his own role as filling gaps no one else has covered.
Okabe works at Live Wire, not BINARY HAZE itself. Both studios sit under the Adglow group, an IT company whose president set aside roughly 1 billion yen from contract work and asked staff for game pitches. Nobody submitted one. Okabe brought the ENDER LILIES concept instead.
The first three months produced a mock built only to look right, and the team "fudged" its way to release. The budget ran 300 to 500 million yen, staffed by people Okabe knew from Neverland Company, the Rune Factory studio he joined after applying to only VanillaWare and Neverland. The target was VanillaWare-style 2D character animation, and the genre followed Hollow Knight's success, not preference. Okabe expected 10,000 to 50,000 copies.
Costs have risen but the ceiling stays at 500 million yen. The team is under 20 people, with one writer and one programmer, and a single game takes three to four years.
He designed ENDER LILIES around clean, familiar fantasy: a forest, a castle, a witch, a knight. Contrast drives his character work, so the white, frail girl pairs against black, ugly, strong knights, and the pairings repeat in ENDER MAGNOLIA with a small androgynous child and a homunculus.
Okabe named PRAGMATA as a recent source of envy, an uncle-and-girl buddy game close to what he wanted, which he skipped out of embarrassment. Taro countered that he feels no envy, and that ICO and Ikaruga were so perfect he decided he did not need to make games in those genres.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.