Square Enix’s amazing Nier origami is real ‘above the fold’ content
The work by Finnish artist Juho Könkkölä took 210 hours to make
Chris Scullion
This is a blog post, where VGC writers post irreverent and (occasionally) entertaining coverage of video game culture.
Origami can be a confusing thing to get your head around, but when everything comes together it can lead to something amazing.
The same could be said about Nier: Automata, which blew minds back in 2017 with its genre-bending shenanigans and earned the series a whole new raft of fans.
Created by Finnish origami artist Juho Könkkölä, the papercraft versions of Emil and the Protagonist are exceptionally detailed.
Even more impressive, they were created using traditional Japanese paper folding techniques, meaning they were each folded from a single sheet of Wenzhou paper. Juho didn’t cut any corners here – literally, in this case, because that goes against the rules.
Apparently, it took a staggering 210 hours to create the figures, because of the amount of planning work that went into the process. Juho had to carefully decide how much paper would be allocated to each part of the figures, and then planned out every fold in advance.
He then had to pre-crease several hundred creases onto the square sheet of paper, which took him a day for each character alone.
“It was a long process to recreate the characters from NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139… but I’m very proud of the final two pieces of art,”, Juho said.
“When the concept was first brought to me, I instantly had a clear vision of how I could bring Emil and the Protagonist to life through the medium of Origami.
“The Protagonist was the hardest to recreate, due to the complex dimensional shapes, but I think the extra detail really adds to the final pieces. I hope I have done the franchise justice and that the fans enjoy my work.”
If you’re sitting there wondering what origami has to do with Nier, we understand. But here’s a connection if it makes you feel better – replicant was also the term used for the bioengineered characters in Blade Runner, and an origami unicorn was a big plot point there. So if you want to go with that, go for it.
