Yoko Taro Lost His Emil Mask and His Replacement Is a Bit Terrifying and Quite Possibly Cursed

Yoko Taro, the director behind such games as Nier: Automata and Drakengard, revealed he lost the iconic mask he wears in public that is modeled after one worn by Nier’s Emil. As if that wasn’t tragic enough, the replacement leprechaun mask he chose for the time being is actually a bit terrifying and quite possibly cursed.

As reported by Kotaku, Taro was attending Anime Expo 2023 in Los Angeles so he could host a panel about his upcoming anime, KamiErabi God.app, and the mask was lost the night before his panel while he was out drinking.

Taro claims he didn’t lose the Emil mask, but instead, the blame fell to a producer from Fuji TV he shared a drink with. Taro then asked the producer to find him a new mask, but that turned out to be a difficult challenge.

After some time, they happened upon the large leprechaun mask you can see below at a Los Angeles costume store.

ダンガンロンパ小高さんと会いました。

ヨコオ「髪の色変えたんですね」
小高さん「ゲームに合わせて血の色です」

だそうです。 pic.twitter.com/GcEblGF1Y8

— yokotaro (@yokotaro) July 3, 2023

“Of course in LA, you know? Leave it to LA to have this specialist store just for masks. And so we went into that store and there was the biggest mask like literally the biggest one they had was one that was sitting up on the shelves and had been there for 30 years,” Taro said.

He then said it appeared the mask was a “going-away present that the store owner’s grandmother had gifted to the business.”

“I thought ‘Oh, poor thing, but it was the best mask there. It was just the best fit. And so I convinced them to let me buy it,” Taro said.

The story doesn’t stop there for the $120 mask, however, as Taro believes the mask was cheaper than he expected because it is probably cursed/possessed by “the spirit of the store owner’s grandmother or a cousin who apparently died in 1945.”

エミールマスクを紛失し、現地でなんとか代替品を入手しようとしたときに手に入ったのがコレ。ロサンゼルスすごすぎる。 https://t.co/R0kHVJBwUQ

— yokotaro (@yokotaro) July 3, 2023

“It’s gotta be possessed or something like that. … It has to be cursed or possessed. There’s something going on with it,” Taro said.

We here at IGN will continue to follow this story closely to see if those rumors turn out to be true.

For more, check out our IGN Inside story about the Nier: Automata mod that fooled the world.

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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.