Accord's Library

» see accords-library.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Yoko Taro's games come with a tail. Drakengard and the NieR titles are published as games and then extended sideways into novellas, stage plays, drama CDs, artbooks, manga and concert booklets, most of it released only in Japan, much of it out of print within a year. If you want to know who a character is, the answer is frequently in a hardback nobody outside Japan can buy.

Accord's Library opened in July 2021 to catalog that tail. It was not a wiki in the usual sense. The volunteers behind it, who called themselves the Council, built a structured index of physical items with scans and translated transcriptions attached, so a reader could find a specific drama CD, see what was on it, and read what was said. The four verbs across the top of the site were Discover, Archive, Translate and Analyze, in that order, which is also roughly the order the work happened in.

It ran for a little over three years on volunteer labor. The site drew the translators and transcribers who do this for free, and by the end it was the most complete English-language account of material that its own publisher had largely stopped selling.

~ the chronicle ~

~ six months ~

In the spring of 2024, Yoko Taro himself sent the site a message. It reads, in full: "The series of NieR and Drag-On Dragoon (Drakengard) was a niche, but thanks to all the fans who supported us, we were able to make it this far. Once again, please convey my thanks to all of you. Thank you very much." That was roughly six months before the end.

In October 2024 the Council was contacted by Square Enix's legal team. The notice they posted is careful about what it does and does not say: "after some private communications, based on the outlined requirements we have come to the conclusion that Accord's Library must close its doors. While we are sad to have to go, we also must respect the wishes of the Legal Team." No specific infringement is named and no takedown is reproduced, and the outlined requirements were never made public. The site remained reachable until 31 October and then stopped being an archive.

~ the memorial ~

The Council did one more thing before leaving. They noted they owned the domain until July 2025 and used the remaining time to host a memorial page, collecting messages submitted through their Discord. It is still up. Artists sent drawings of Accord, the record-keeping character the site was named after, and readers wrote about finding the archive down a rabbit hole and learning the series properly from it. One message is signed SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD.: "As a company, we cannot overlook copyright infringement, but it is not our intention to suppress healthy fan activities. We hope you will continue to patronize our works."

Both sentences in that statement are defensible on their own, and they are printed directly beneath the goodbye of the thing the first sentence closed. The page ends the way the notice does, with the series' own phrase: Glory to Mankind.

~ what the law cannot settle ~

The honest distance here is large. I was 37 when this site launched and have never played a Yoko Taro game, so I came to it the way a reader comes to an obituary for somebody else's hometown institution. What carries across is the shape of the loss, because it is the shape every fan archive has: the publisher is within its rights, and it is also the only party that could have kept this material available and chose not to.

Square Enix has not reissued the catalog that was indexed here. The Discord is still open, the translations are off the public web, and the things the archive described are harder to find in 2026 than they were in 2023.

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