So yeah, I always wanted to bring it to the bigger screen. "Maybe a tablet would be different, but still it's not a big screen.
"Early on, I was concerned about playing a horror game on a smaller screen," says Kono. As he tells it, though, the PC version is the game he wants to make most. And he's going the crowdfunding route for the PC version because the loans won't carry him that far.
He's planning to make the mobile and Vita versions either way, using his own money and loans from friends. Unlike many Kickstarter campaigns, Kono isn't presenting his as an all-or-none situation. But is this only for Vita or only for mobile?' There were a lot of disappointed voices," Kono says. "Once we announced, the fans' reaction was basically, 'Yeah, we've been waiting for this. And now he's ready to unveil it under its official title, NightCry, with a Kickstarter campaign coming soon for a potential PC version as well. It's a murder mystery set on a cruise ship, and like Clock Tower, it focuses on running away and solving puzzles rather than shooting or fighting enemies. He announced the game in September as Project Scissors, a mobile and Vita spiritual successor to Clock Tower.
He chose to show the popularity of mobile and portable games in Japan relative to console games, as seen through a day in the life on a train. Īnd the final cover comes from industry newcomer Vin Hill, who recently made news with his hypothetical take on what an Assassin's Creed game set in Japan could look like. He then used the art from that show as a starting point for his cover art collage. But since the game is no longer available on WiiWare, in 2014 Iida decided to produce a new episode of Discipline as a live show he's performed in front of a crowd in Japan. In 2009, he released a game called Discipline for WiiWare in Japan, in which the player talks with criminals in prison. Iida's cover is a collage of art he originally created for a live show.
Iida's piece shows two hands in handcuffs, because he says, "The current industry is in a negative spiral, and we cannot say that it is healthy." He says the situation reminds him of how Japan's film industry struggled when TV became popular and that he thinks the indie game movement will play an important role in bringing the game industry back. The fourth cover comes from Kazutoshi Iida, who has directed some of Japan's most creative titles over the past 20 years: Tail of the Sun, Aquanaut's Holiday, Doshin the Giant and now KakeXun, a project seeing through the final game design document created by the late Kenji Eno. He decided to show how social games are moving away from their antisocial tendencies with players teaming up to play games in public - which just so happens to be one of the key features of Monster Strike. The third image comes from Ogata Yuichi, an artist at Mixi working on mobile smash hit Monster Strike. He decided to play up the idea that Japan has some of the most famous developers in the world but those developers keep making the same types of games, so he drew them as if they were on a Star Wars poster. The second image comes from Muhan Ogikubo, a pen name for an artist who has worked on some of Japan's biggest game franchises but requested we not use his real name. He describes his piece, showing two schoolgirls playing in the foreground and the fallout from Fukushima's nuclear disaster in the distance, as a way to show young people as the industry's future with the baggage from the past lingering behind.
The first image comes from Takeshi Oga, who was the lead concept artist on Gravity Rush (you might know him from the game's box art) and has contributed to the Siren series and Final Fantasy 11.
Rather than sum things up ourselves, we asked a handful of artists currently working in Japan's game industry to give their take on the industry. Instead, think of it as a sampling.Īnd it starts on the cover. Inevitably, we couldn't get to everyone doing interesting things, so this isn't meant to be a comprehensive look at what's going on over there. So we decided to highlight some of the most interesting games, people and companies in Japan, to discuss what they're working on and look at how that work ties into Japan's game industry as a whole. Takeshi Oga art (click each cover thumbnail for a high resolution version) Muhan Ogikubo art Ogata Yuichi art Kazutoshi Iida art Vin Hill art