An Audience With…
The president of Nippon Ichi on the benefits of sticking to what you know best
Nippon Ichi president Sohei Niikawa on the benefits of sticking stic to what you know
The man behind Disgaea believes there is a bright future for Japan’s boutique console game-makers. Yet his studio is lucky to be here.
Nippon Ichi’s earliest software, a clutter of jigsaw games and mahjong sims, did little to put the developer, which was founded in 1993, on the map. The studio, based in the nowhere region of Gifu, somewhere in the middle of Japan, was mostly unheard of, even to Japanese videogame hobbyists. One fan, Sohei Niikawa, only replied to a job advertisement at the company because he had been rejected by just about every other studio in Japan, including Square Enix, which turned him down no fewer than six times. It turned out to be a shrewd move for Niikawa, who in just a few years steered the company away from the brink of financial ruin to become one of Japan’s most successful and, now, longest-running mid-sized studios, best known for revolutionising the strategy-RPG genre. Having staunchly rejected the siren call of the Japanese smartphone game market, Niikawa remains optimistic about the future of smaller companies, especially those which, like Nippon Ichi, have managed to catch the prevailing winds of Nintendo’s support in their sails.
Tell us about how you came to join Nippon Ichi. Was it your first job in the industry?
I joined Nippon Ichi in 1996 as soon as I graduated from Tokai University. At the time it was a company of about ten people. I actually had no intention of joining the game industry when I was growing up. Since high school I had been obsessed with archaeology. I studied this at college, as part of my history major and, essentially, wanted to become Indiana Jones when I grew up. This was my dream: to become a great archaeologist. That said, games were always in the periphery. I had been playing them since I was a child. In my third year of university, Final Fantasy V for Super Famicom released. When I finished the game I had all these thoughts and emotions running through me: ‘How does a person go about making a game like this? And if this was me, would I have done this, or this or this different?’ That was the moment at which I realised how interesting game design could be, and when I decided to change the course of my life away from archaeology, toward games.
So, what would you have done differently had you been the designer of Final Fantasy V?
Ha! Well, at the time I was a rank amateur so all of my ideas were unrealistic – the kinds of things that people who don’t make games think are easy, or workable. They were things that, with what I know today, would never have been feasible. But I was so convinced of the strength of my ideas that, the day after finishing Final Fantasy V, I applied for a job at Squaresoft, as the company was known at the time. I submitted a design document for a game idea, but it, and I, was rejected. Undeterred, I applied again with an idea for a different game. In the end, I wrote six different game proposals, each one for a different roleplaying game, and each time I was rejected.
Did you not think at this point that you should maybe just pursue a different career path?
No, not at all! I wanted to join the game industry, and Square was just one of about 50 companies I wrote to with my resume. I couldn’t code. I wasn’t an artist or a composer, and I had no game-design experience. No surprise, then, that no place was interested in taking me on. Then, one day I was reading a magazine and there was a tiny advertisement that said: ‘Come and work at Nippon Ichi Software’. I had never heard of them, and the advert mentioned that the studio was based in Gifu, which is in the absolute middle of nowhere. Who are these guys and what are they about, I wondered? But the name – which translates as ‘Number One In Japan’ – intrigued me. Besides, I thought, I want to work in the game industry and no company I’ve heard of will take me on, so why not try these guys? So I applied and was accepted, and here we are. You can see why I would feel a special degree of appreciation and obligation to Nippon Ichi: they were the ones who took a chance on me.
What did they get you to do when you arrived on your first day?
At the time, the company structure was the president, and then, below him, the programmers and then, at the bottom, the designers. I had none of those skills, so at first they put me into sales and marketing. A month after I joined the company, I took a business trip with the president to the company’s satellite office in Osaka. En route, he told me that the studio was making a mahjong game, and that I was going to be the game director. I thought: ‘What in the world kind of company is this, that I would be given a promotion from nowhere, with no experience?’ I wasn’t even working physically with the team; I was based in Gifu, and they were all in Osaka.
Still, I recognised that this was my big chance. I entered the company hoping to make games, and here was the chance for me to make one. At a larger company
it would have taken me three-to-five years before I even had the chance to become an assistant to a game director.
Why did he take a chance on you?
He never gave me a reason. But I suspect that he knew I desperately wanted to make games, and thought he’d give me the chance to see if it was something at which I would flourish. Even today in the company, this method of giving young people opportunities and having them rise to the occasion is very much alive. It’s in our DNA. Without this culture there would be no Disgaea.
What happened to the mahjong game?
It didn’t sell very well. But it did launch on time, so there was that...
So you had learned how to deliver a project on time, but this wasn’t the kind of game you joined the industry to make. How did you make the transition to making RPGs, the style of game you’d always dreamed of creating?
There was a jigsaw game in development at the company, for which I did the sales and marketing. Nippon Ichi was, at the time, a company that made what we might term tabletop games, and none of them sold very well. In the first couple of years that I was at the company, I privately thought that, if they continued down this path, they were going to go bankrupt.
Hang on: who was bankrolling the company to keep it going if it was losing all this money?
A lot of different places. We did some contract work. We were still receiving royalties from some earlier games that were continuing to sell. And we took lots of bank loans.
How did the company get out of that situation?
Well, I thought that, if this company is headed towards an ignominious end, why not go out in style? So I petitioned the CEO: ‘Let me make an RPG’. I wrote the plan and the story, and that game turned into Rhapsody, which was a musical RPG.
It’s an extraordinary jump. Not only are you moving from tabletop games, which typically have a modest scope and budget, to an RPG, which is a far more expensive kind of game to make, but you’re also attempting to make it in the style of a West End musical. Not only do you have zero experience of creating this kind of game, but more broadly, there is no precedent to follow. How did you go about it?
I knew from working in sales and marketing that this company not known for RPGs would not easily be able to sell an RPG. This necessitated having a game that had clear sales points, and clear differentiators to other games in the market. No other company was making musical RPGs. So there was a gap in the market.
Were you a big fan of musicals?
Up until that moment, no! But I did recognise that games could offer entertainment on multiple levels. So I thought it might work. Why not shift the background music to the foreground music? I watched a lot of Disney movies.
So what happened next? The game comes out and changes the fortunes of the company?
Yes. It was a huge change. Up to that point, our games never sold more than 10,000 copies. Rhapsody sold 30,000 copies. For a company of our size, that was a very big deal. I got a big bonus, and we got to go to Hawaii for a company trip.
What did you spend your bonus on?
An Omega watch, I think.
“MY DREAM WAS TO BECOME A GREAT ARCHAEOLOGIST. THAT SAID, I HAD BEEN PLAYING GAMES SINCE I WAS A CHILD”
“RATHER THAN TRYING TO MAKE WESTERNSTYLE GAMES, WE HAVE EMBRACED THAT WHICH MAKES US UNIQUE”
And how did you get from here to the company’s first smash hit, Disgaea? I made two more musical RPGs in the style of Rhapsody, and, other than the musical element, all three were quite orthodox RPGs. The third one changed the gameplay a little. Rather than just have an interesting story, I wanted to now make a game that was interesting from a mechanical perspective. So I chose to make a game in the strategy-RPG genre, La Pucelle Tactics. While the focus was still primarily on the story, this was the game that laid the bedrock for the Disgaea series. Looking at the reviews from the time, the game design was well received. I felt that gamers were looking for experiences that can only be had through games. So I decided for the next game to focus more energy on the game systems; I wanted to spend 80 per cent of our development focus on them. Tell us more about your choice of genre. Strategy RPGs were out of fashion in the early 2000s. The
Ogre Battle series and Final Fantasy Tactics had sold well in the previous decade, but that style of game had fallen from fashion. No one else was really making them. What was your attraction to it? At the time the genre of RPGs in general was extremely competitive in Japan. Within this context of fierce competition, we looked at what we, as a small company with limited budgets, could do. Looking at the genre of SRPGs, there was some popularity still with games like
Fire Emblem. But there had never been the kinds of huge sales that would attract major players. That created an attractive niche for us, a market that wasn’t too crowded. I knew that our game would never sell a million copes. But I thought, just maybe, we could sell 100,000 copies of a great SRPG. Given the constraints we had on staff and budget, this route made a lot of sense. With the benefit of hindsight, it was absolutely the correct decision. Most developers, when they decide to create a game in a genre that is unfamiliar to the company, start with just a few modifications to the market-leading titles. Disgaea was different, in that it introduced many novel mechanics that went on to lay the template for Nippon Ichi’s output for years to come. Who was coming up with all this stuff? There were three core members of the team: the director, who was also lead programmer; the art director, who was also a designer; and finally, there was me, acting as the scenario writer and producer. We were the vision-holders. Now, we didn’t know what would be interesting or what would sell. All we had decided was to set the game in the Netherworld, and to make the characters demons. Once we had decided on this base, the three of us went away and came up with ideas for what would be interesting or novel within our particular area of expertise.
Because the setting was the Netherworld, there was a sense that anything goes. We all worked on the same floor. We went our own separate ways for three months, then joined up again to put everything together that we had worked on separately, within our different areas. In hindsight, having this unique setting of the Netherworld encouraged unusual ideas to grow and be fostered. It gave us freedom that we might not have had in a traditional fantasy, knights and castles setting. We actually had no design document, and we were still adding new ideas right up to the week the discs were printed. It would never happen today, but we felt that it was truly our last shot, so we put everything we had into it. Nothing was spared. Every idea went into the pot. Did you sell the amount you’d hoped for? Yes. It sold 130,000 copies in Japan. But then it sold 140,000 more in North America, 50,000 in Europe and 20,000 in Asia. So: 340,000 copies in total. Needless to say the game vastly exceeded our expectations. After this, you release a flurry of strategy RPGs, entirely new IPs, each with their own unique spin. I assume this was to capitalise on the success and momentum of Disgaea, but by the late 2000s you had saturated the market, and Nippon Ichi’s share price toppled. What did you get wrong? Yes, we put too many games into the marketplace. But also, it’s possible that we had lost sight of what consumers were looking for in our games. Phantom Brave sold about as well as Disgaea. But then, with Makai
Kingdom, we had a sharp drop off in sales. And the game that followed this, Soul Nomad, sold even more poorly. That’s when I began to think: ‘ Maybe what people are looking for is another game in the Disgaea world?’ So we decided to put out a sequel. And that sequel sold very well too. Today Nippon Ichi puts out far fewer games, and you seem to be more intentional with your releases. Is this in response to those difficult years a decade ago? Those experiences play a part in the way we work today, of course, but we also changed our way of working. We used to have a very linear production model, whereby the entire company would be working on a single project at a time. Today we have three teams working on separate projects, which is a far less risky way of doing business. It means that we aren’t banking on each game to be a massive success, and it also means that we can diversify in the kinds of games that we are making. You have seen huge changes in the Japanese industry in the years since you joined Nippon Ichi. How positive are you feeling about the current state of the Japanese industry? Yes, it has been a turbulent time in the Japanese industry. That much is certain. Particularly, there have been a lot of mergers between larger companies. Small to medium-sized developers like us that exist on their own finances have become fewer and fewer in number, especially those companies that only make games for consumer consoles.
For that reason, I think Nippon Ichi has an important role: to show that it is possible to flourish as a mediumsize company that is focused not on phone games and the like, but purely on the console market. To do this, we have to be self-aware. Nobody wants blockbuster games from Nippon Ichi. And we are also aware that our Japanese-ness is a part of our core appeal, and strength. We specifically use Japanese ideas, themes and visuals. Rather than trying to make western-style games, like some other Japanese companies have tried to do, we have embraced that which makes us unique. We will continue to make games for home consoles, and we will continue to make games in the style for which we have become known. Nippon Ichi was an early adopter of the Nintendo Switch. What role do you think Nintendo’s system is playing in allowing small-to-medium-sized Japanese companies like yours to both survive and flourish? It’s true: Disgaea 5 was practically a launch title for the Switch. That had a huge positive effect for us. Releasing the company’s flagship title, even if it was a port, for Nintendo’s flagship hardware close to launch was a boon for us; it sold incredibly well both in Japan and abroad. It’s important to note that Nintendo was extremely supportive. They came to Gifu several times to teach us in person about the hardware and its ins and outs. I am incredibly grateful to Nintendo, this giant of the industry, for coming out to the middle of nowhere to support us. The final point to make is that, for Nippon Ichi, at least, the Switch is the ideal piece of hardware. Right now, in Western territories, non-handheld software is what sells. On the other hand, in Japan portable software is highly popular. This has created an issue in the past for developers, a gap between Japanese playing habits and those found in the rest of the world. The Switch closes this gap, by meeting the needs of both audiences. So we worked hard to be there right at the beginning. And it’s working out for us.