State of the Onion

Yoshio Kimura peels back the layers of his studio’s eccentricities

Yoshiro Kimura peels back the layers of his studio’s wonderfully eccentric catalogue

Before he founded Onion Games in 2012, Yoshiro Kimura felt lost, a man “without a cause”. He’d left Grasshopper Manufacture, after producing Suda 51’s No More Heroes and its sequel and directing the wonderful Little King’s Story. And with the Tohoku earthquake still fresh in his mind, Kimura found himself thinking about his career. “Games didn’t seem to play a part in helping humanity, in helping Japan rebuild,” he says. Meanwhile, the industry he loved seemed to be increasingly focused on social games, and that just wasn’t Kimura at all. He wasn’t sure where to go or what to do.

The turning point came during a trip to San Francisco to attend 2012’s Independent Games Festival. Kimura looked up at a huge screen, showcasing a whole host of indie games, and found himself transfixed – and then, suddenly, inspired. “It was almost as if the screen itself was talking to me, saying, ‘Hey, Kimura. There’s all this possibility out here. What do you want to do?’”

He drew upon his feelings and frustrations, and poured them into three ideas. The first was puzzle game Million Onion Hotel, with its story set on an island that appears after Japan has sunk beneath the sea following a huge earthquake. Then came Dandy Dungeon, a semi-autobiographical tale of a middleaged man, Yamada, who quits his job at a large game company to become a bedroom coder, tapping away at a keyboard in his underpants. “I imagined if I was this really talented programmer, maybe I could be like Yamada,” he says, before adding with an impish chuckle, “Although naked.”

The third was Black Bird, which took inspiration from the games Kimura was playing at the time. As a friend of ZUN, maker of The Touhou Project series of bullet-hell shooters, Kimura saw potential in flipping the idea of one character against impossible odds, imagining a “typhoon, tearing through all these enemies”. Black Bird, he says, represents a natural disaster: “It was a way of turning the tables, in terms of how I was thinking about the earthquake.”

The studio became a work-for-hire outlet until it had earned enough to start work on Million Onion Hotel. Then publisher DMM expressed an interest in Dandy Dungeon, and development temporarily shifted to that game instead. With Black Bird now out on PC and Switch, Onion Games has launched all three games within 18 months, having grown from three to ten employees. After that early rush of creative inspiration, these days Kimura takes his time thinking up new concepts.

Kimura’s tastes tend towards older games, though he doesn’t think of them as ‘retro’, seizing upon a moment when his translator pauses to say “traditional” in English. He prefers studying games with unusual concepts; “Games that weren’t quite what we would think of now as complete or polished, but that had something there. I like thinking how I would remake them if I was to do it now.” He’s not seeking to create something brand new, in other words, rather to examine ideas he’s enjoyed in the past and twist them a bit.

One way is through the studio’s distinctive audiovisual style, with music in particular important to Kimura. A fan of prog rock, classical and opera, he often tries to match his game designs with specific musical genres. It’s most apparent in Black Bird, with waves of enemies appearing in time with the score.

But there’s plenty

going on in all Kimura’s games. Million Onion Hotel and Black Bird are deceptively simple ideas, with nuances to their scoring systems that make them rewarding to replay. None of this is explained, because Kimura isn’t a fan of the trend towards excessive tutorialising. “When the player finds those other systems for themselves, that’s part of the game – they’re discovering something,” he says.

He’s concerned that people might not dig beneath the surface, citing reviews of Million Onion Hotel where players swiftly dismissed it. “There’s not much I can really do about it,” he says. “If they don’t sell, we may have to rethink how we should be making games. But for me, this is the only way I can make games. So that might be the end of Onion Games!”

That seems unlikely. Black Bird mightn’t have sold as well overseas as previous games, but it’s been a success in Japan. It’s a sign that whatever’s next for Kimura, he’s not prepared to make concessions. con He roars with laughter when jokingly jok imagining a mobile version of Black Bla Bird with gyro controls, saying he’d never nev port a game if he felt it would be compromised. com Either way, he’s no longer lost, lost but rather free to look forward. The tsunami tsun has long gone. “There’s this huge ocean oce of possibilities,” he says. “I need to listen l carefully to what my soul is saying, say and work out which direction it’s going to take.”

“There’s not much I can do. If they don’t sell, we may have to rethink how we should be making games”