Inside Square Enix’s new micro studio, which aims to recapture the Japanese RPG’s glory days
When Atsushi Hashimoto joined the videogame industry as a young designer, he made the decision he wouldn’t work for Square Enix. It wasn’t that he disliked the company or didn’t get along with its bulging back catalogue of games, many of which Hashimoto had played as a boy. “These were the kinds of games I wanted to make,” he says. “No, I didn’t apply for Square Enix because I didn’t feel it was right to try to recreate something you love so much.”
It was a pact that Hashimoto has clearly broken, as we sit together in a cramped meeting room on the second floor of Square Enix’s extravagant office complex in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Another floor is home to the company’s cloud-focused Shinra Technologies division, named after the nefarious company at the centre of Final Fantasy VII. Elsewhere within the building, a team of hundreds toils on Final Fantasy XV, the company’s current flagship, working under the guidance of Hajime Tabata, who hopes to establish a new technological and narrative high-water mark for the series. In this sense, Hashimoto’s job is diametrically opposed to that of Tabata’s. He’s leading a relatively tiny team that’s returning to Square Enix’s past, creating a game that hopes to recapture the spirit and ambience of the SNES and PlayStation RPGs of Hashimoto’s childhood.
In fairness, Hashimoto didn’t know that this – or indeed Square Enix – was what he was getting into at the time. The idea to establish a micro studio to work on vintage-style JRPGs came from Square’s current CEO, Yosuke Matsuda. Rather than advertising his plan, Matsuda instead placed on one of the major Japanese game industry recruitment sites an incognito job listing looking for RPG creators. There was no mention that the company behind the advertisement has been responsible for many of history’s best-loved RPGs. Matsuda, presumably, wanted to attract people whose passion for the genre was greater than their desire to adorn their CVs with a Square Enix stamp.
“When I first looked at the concept, I felt it fitted perfectly with those memorable RPGs from my childhood,” Hashimoto says. “Games are constantly shifting towards high-end, realistic aesthetics, but I feel there’s still a place for stylised presentation. There’s another form of evolution that’s not chasing realism. That’s what I perceived in the concept. Now that I’m at a more mature stage in my career, I’m relishing the chance to return to my earliest loves.” Hashimoto, who cut his teeth at Racjin, the Osaka-based developer behind Bomberman 64, Trap Gunner and ASH: Archaic Sealed Heat, an RPG directed by Final Fantasy’s founder Hironobu Sakaguchi, was offered a job. He along with ten other applicants form Tokyo RPG Factory.
It’s a name that bespeaks an industrial approach to game design and manufacture. Arguably, during the 1990s, Squaresoft (as the company was known at the time) was something of an RPG factory. It released dozens of games in the genre, many of them experimental, from the science-fiction epic Xenogears to the multi-protagonist Super Famicom game Live A Live. Tokyo RPG Factory’s debut for PS4 and Vita, Ikenie To Yuki No Setsuna (the English title is yet to be settled), however, doesn’t display the slightly negative mass-production connotations of its studio’s name. It draws influence from both Studio Ghibli’s wistful, whimsical art style and, in a move that will please genre connoisseurs, Chrono Trigger in terms of its team-based battle system. It appears, in other words, well-crafted.
The project has only been in development for a year: the concept was written in September 2014, development began the following month and, by August 2015, an alpha version was complete. Built in Unity, the game is set in a snow-filled world and cherry picks designs from Square’s back catalogue. Weapons and armour can be studded with enhancing jewels, much like Final Fantasy VII’s Materia. The cast of seven possible party members can be similarly switched in and out. The character models and environment design call to mind the little-known PlayStation cult classic Threads Of Fate. The game is divided into three spheres of play – town, world and dungeon – in the Dragon Quest style. And battles play out in realtime, as in Chrono Trigger, with added interest in that, by timing your inputs well, you can deliver bonus damage, as in Xenogears.
The game fulfils its studio’s remit, then, in terms of borrowing from the genre’s past highlights. Nevertheless, the games from which it draws were, at the time of their development, the stars of Square Enix, created by huge teams that were given the most generous budgets. Today, Tokyo RPG Factory is a micro studio of ten people (although they partner with a further 30 or so external contractors). Despite this, Hashimoto is confident in the team’s ability to deliver a game of comparable quality to its forebears. “We’re fortunate,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of talented designers who have joined for the project. They are vocal and, of course, have their egos. But we’re good at working together and compromising. I think we’re being saved by the calibre of people that we have on the team in that regard.”
Regardless of whether or not the team can create a game that can stand next to the greats, the question of whether or not an audience exists for this style of nouveau-retro game looms. Is nostalgia enough to support the endeavour in commercial terms? “Obviously the nostalgia angle is important, and I firmly believe that market still exists,” Hashimoto says. “Those are the emotions that we’re trying to elicit. So, of course, we’re trying to make something that’s familiar, but also a new experience within the formula. If it’s just the same as the old titles then it’s not meaningful for us as a creative team. So, in the art and design, we’re also trying to bring something new.”
Something new, then, but also, Hashimoto hopes, something that lasts. “Our collective dream is that we create games that are memorable and that stay in the hearts of players for decades,” he says. “Personally, I’d love to see this kind of style of game continue to evolve and, by seeing it evolve, to create and define new kinds of classics. There are so many things that we want to try out. Hopefully by making these things a reality, we’ll also make something special.”