Yosuke Saito: You've played the demo so I'm sure you'll understand - you've got the different difficulty settings - Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard. What our QA team told us from their test plays is that generally if you work on normal difficulty level and you just concentrate on the main story and don't do too much outside that on the first play-through it should take around 25 hours.If you go for a completionist playthrough, trying to get all the enhancements, the collection items and all what you'd call... maybe, I don't know, the end content - superbosses that you have to take down first by becoming strong enough to even fight them... if you add all that in, you're probably looking at about 55 hours of play time in total.
It's very interesting... we didn't actually start out thinking we needed to be 50 hours just because we were an RPG and then really force extra stuff in to draw it out. The way we approached it is quite interesting really - we just came up with all these ideas of things we thought would be cool, things that'd go well and work in the game. What we then concentrated on was making sure that each of those elements felt right while you were playing it. We didn't really think about the final balancing and the final content construction or anything like that until quite late in the project.
It was actually quite recently we found out that figure of 55 hours from the QA guys... we just piled everything we had together and it came to 55 hours. In the end, it does seem to... maybe because of that, completely by accident, it's come to be quite a good balance in the end. It really does feel good, and the content there is worthwhile - it was made because it was good content, not because we needed to hit a certain length.
Taro Yoko: The way that Nier is constructed is... we've got multiple different endings in the game, and certainly they take part at different times in the play cycle. So... if you only, say, play for ten hours, you'll reach a certain earlier ending in the game, and that does reach one conclusion to the story, so if you only play for that much you'll still get one complete package of the game - but you're free to keep playing on after that, of course.