It has been a month since Accord's Library was shut down by Square Enix. To the uninitiated, the previous sentence might seem like some gobbledygook, so let me explain what each of those things are. Before that info dump, however, I have to do an info dump about my experience with Yoko Taro, Accord's Library, and Square Enix. Allow audio to play for a nice background music to accompany you while you read the rest of the blog post.
I like Yoko Taro. I think his stories are pretty good. His games leave a lot to be desired when it comes to gameplay, but he knows how to write. At the very least, he knows how to write in a way that tugs on my heartstrings. His characters, in specific, connect with me in a level that few others might. Oh yeah, who is Yoko Taro? I forgot about that. He's a guy who makes games. He also has a cool mask of a character from one of his games. I was introduced to his works very late compared to a lot of others. I can't even say it was love at first sight since it took a lot for me to warm up to basically everything in the first game of his that I played. Regardless, by the end, I did enjoy it on some level. Enough to spend full price on his next game at launch, which is something I had never done before. Regardless, what ended up happening was when I consumed more and more of his works, there was still a part of me that ended up yearning for more. Which is how I came across Accord's Library.
Accord's Library is (was) a site created by dedicated fans of Yoko Taro's work - translating, archiving, and preserving his massive library of materials. Unbeknownst to me, all of his franchises were massive regarding the amount of side content that was somewhat essential to the games. The original NieR release didn't even have the final ending in-game, you had to go get it elsewhere as an example. Accord's Library had a massive amount of this stuff collected in one place, making it easy to access. I'm not unfamiliar with chasing down stuff from the depths of the internet, but if everything I wanted to consume was accessible in one place, that makes my job all that easier. I loved Accord's Library for that. Yet, all of that would be taken away with such ease by Square Enix.
Square Enix is a company of sorts. It used to be two different companies - Square and Enix. I was much more familiar with Square's line of work and didn't (still don't) have much interest in Enix's bigger titles. Regardless, both companions made supposedly good games. Eventually, they merged, and Square Enix was formed. In the process, the making of good games started to fade away. I can't say much about Square Enix anymore except I will not be supporting them anymore. I have bought many games from them, some of them very good. I was even planning on buying a monthly subscription to Final Fantasy XIV eventually - a game which I've heard has some decent writing of its own. I guess it will not happen, not in the foreseeable future anyway. Square Enix got in contact with the team running Accord's Library a little over a month ago - during October of this year, requesting certain materials to be removed from the website. As the amount of materials was very high in quantity, the team decided to shut down their operations fully, informing people of this decision in advance. I didn't want Accord's Library to shut down. Apparently, neither did a lot of other people.
Me and a number of individuals thought of this practice from SQEX fucking over fans as something not very nice. The Accord's Library staff clarified they wouldn't be providing the data, tools, etc. used to run the website - somewhat understandable as they were covering their own asses, but I didn't welcome those news open-armed either. The aforementioned me and a number of individuals didn't want this wonderful collection of resources to be lost to time, especially when it was gathered up like this, so we got to work on archiving. Over the two or so week period, we gathered as much of the data as possible. It was a very annoying process, I don't know about the others, but I had never taken part in such an operation before. I put my spaghetti coding skills to use, and now we have multiple copies, some of them modular, some of them not.
Honestly speaking, I was in awe of the scale when it came to Accord's Library. I had only ever used the main website and never took interest in the inner workings of the whole thing. I had made similar websites for work before, but I didn't have to know the whole inner workings there either, everyone was tasked with some part of the website. What put so much into perspective for me was going into their Github page and seeing the scale with my own eyes. Incidentally, this also happened in two stages: once when I saw how many repos there were, and a second time when I saw the picture of their architecture in one of their repos.
I won't be providing any links to the archived materials right here, but it's out there. I know one guy from /tarog/ made a WARC archive. We had a guy from the archive Discord server who made a similar WACZ archive, and one person aside from me made an offline HTML copy of the websites. Forgot to mention this prior, but I archived more than just the websites. I re-created the gallery website, which wasn't that difficult considering they were using Szurubooru - an open-source and easy-to-use image board engine for the gallery. All and all, we have these archived close to perfection: