Studio Profile
Everything’s fine and Dandy for Yoshiro Kimura and the team at Japanese indie Onion Games
Yoshiro Kimura’s move into indie games nine years ago felt inevitable. Look through his back catalogue and it reads like that of an indie developer who’s been covertly operating within the publisher system for decades. Since his work on Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 for Square, Kimura’s work has been thrillingly esoteric. Having left the publisher to join Kenichi Nishi’s Love-de-Lic, the Kimura-designed Moon: Remix RPG Adventure
thumbed its nose at JRPG conventions, while 2000’s strange, ambitious life sim LOL: Lack Of Love is considered one of the cult classics of the Dreamcast era. Despite a mixed reaction from critics, the likes of Chulip and the controversial PS2 horror Rule Of Rose (which caused such an outcry among the British tabloid press that its UK release was cancelled) only enhanced Kimura’s status as a maverick. Then in 2009 came what many would argue was his crowning glory: RTS RPG Little King’s Story.
But the enthusiastic reviews it received didn’t translate into strong sales, and while he teamed up with Suda 51 for production roles on the likes of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle and Shadows Of The Damned, Kimura needed a new outlet for his offbeat ideas. It wasn’t until he attended the Game Developers Conference in 2012 – or more specifically, the Independent Games Festival – that he had an epiphany. Gazing up at a large screen of disparate indie games, he felt overwhelmed – and inspired. “For me, it was an experience not unlike shedding a tear at some grand spectacle of Mother Nature,” Kimura tells us. “I just recall being overcome with this nostalgic feeling about hand-crafted games, like the old 8bit computer games from my childhood, being on par with the greatest views nature could offer.”
He decided there and then to set himself a new career goal: he would try to enter the IGF and win an award. But before that came two more achievable aims: “simply making my art known to the world, and being able to survive”. It’s fair to say there wasn’t much of a Japanese indie scene around in 2012, or at least not a wide awareness of it outside Japan. So what made him believe he could succeed? “Honestly, I didn’t believe it then, and we still haven’t succeeded. We’re still always walking a tightrope!” he says. “I don’t think my games have truly been recognised by gamers outside of Japan. But then I’ve always been on the outskirts of the games industry, without many people paying much attention to me.”
He admits to feeling mixed emotions when founding Onion Games along with Kurashima Kazuyuki (art) and Hirofumi Taniguchi (sound and music): Kimura was keen to take on the challenge of working independently, but unsure that the studio could flourish. “I was counting my chickens before they’d hatched,” he says, “but I figured that there were people out there in the world who might buy my games, and even if there were only a few in each country, we could survive.”
Sensibly, Onion Games started small, with Kimura focusing on ideas that would fit mobile platforms. Two concepts leapt out quickly, both defying easy categorisation. Million Onion Hotel is a fast-paced yet surprisingly deep puzzle game with elements of bingo and combo-based scoring, while Dandy Dungeon: Legend Of Brave Yamada is perhaps best described as a selfreflexive Roguelike RPG spliced with an indie rom-com. They’re shot through with Kimura’s trademark off-kilter humour, while root vegetables feature heavily in both as a nod to the developer’s moniker. As characterful as anything Kimura has produced, they managed to find a decent-sized audience in Japan, while attracting a small but loyal following overseas.
Both games, perhaps more importantly, feel tailored to the strengths of the format, making effective use of the touchscreen. We ask Kimura if developing for mobile was a purely creative choice, or if he was thinking about the need to make cost-effective games as a fledgling studio. “It’s nonsense to think about game development
without keeping cost-effectiveness in mind,” he says. “It’s not about game development being necessarily cheap for mobile but expensive for consoles, either. It’s about whether I can envision the final resources, the game rules and the volume needed for a project. I would never begin one without doing that. Why did we start on smartphones? Because I was very interested in touchscreens, and I had plenty of ideas I wanted to try on them. The smartphone game market was also rapidly expanding at the time, so it seemed like something we should try as an indie. From that perspective, you could say I had a valid reason for the projects both creatively and financially.”
Million Onion Hotel came first, at least in Japan. “The process behind coming up with that idea was pretty weird,” Kimura admits. “A programmer showed me a standard whack-amole game he’d made, and while I was playing around with it, I had this sudden vision of Million Onion Hotel: the game rules, the visuals, everything.” Reaching for a sketchbook, he hurriedly scribbled down the illustrations and specifications he’d imagined, and work on the project started immediately. By 2014, Onion Games had a prototype ready, and brought it to indie game showcase BitSummit in Kyoto. “It was lacking in stages, but it was pretty much the same as the finished game,” Kimura recalls. “I can still remember the visitors queuing up to play it at the venue. It made me really happy.”
But Dandy Dungeon ended up being the studio’s first release in the west, the release order shifting due to what Kimura coyly describes as “numerous unforeseen circumstances”. Yet he believes it worked out for the best for Onion
“FOR ME, IT WAS AN EXPERIENCE NOT UNLIKE SHEDDING A TEAR AT SOME GRAND SPECTACLE OF MOTHER NATURE”
Games, with the protagonist Yamada acting as a metaphor for the way it develops games. “I sometimes feel that developers have had to take a back seat in the business of making games to funding, distribution and marketing,” he elaborates. “But the real core, the true spirit of the industry, is developers themselves. Someone has to diligently work away. Someone has to put in all those long hours until the game is done. I think it’s the people that make the games who deserve the praise. Yamada, the hero of Dandy Dungeon,
is always at his desk, working away. And there’s always someone like that, frenziedly typing away. That’s what’s at the heart of videogames.” He acknowledges that Onion Games isn’t simply a one-man show; rather it’s a small team of six people who, like Yamada, all “sit at their desks for long hours, pouring their souls into the games we make. It’s that image that makes me think Dandy Dungeon being released globally as Onion Games’ first title was a good thing”.
With its story about a man who quits his job to make games on his own, it feels like Kimura is drawing on his own experiences for Dandy Dungeon. Was it a cathartic experience? And was he pleased that so many people seemed to identify with it? “Do people actually identify with it?” he asks in return. “I didn’t really feel it was very cathartic in that respect. What did make me happy, though, was the music — the humming and the old guy scat-singing. It’s parts like these where I feel that I maybe took things a little too far, but the players enjoy it, so that makes me happy and gives me a sense of achievement.” The studio’s next game was rather less happy. Wraparound side-scrolling shooter Black Bird,
partly inspired by the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, brought the underlying darkness of Kimura’s other games into the foreground. “Fundamentally, I’ve always been fond of works that have a darker tone, and I think that’s another reason I made the game,” he adds. “At the end of the day, I still like games like Rule Of Rose.”
Even with its unsettling imagery, Black Bird retains its makers’ fingerprints, with a character and charm that feels uniquely Onion Games. Rather than consciously trying to make more commercial games, it feels as if the studio has tried to stay true to itself. It’s evident that individuality is important to Kimura, we suggest, but as founder of a smaller studio, does he find himself thinking about ways to reach a wider audience? “Of course,” he says, “but that has to be done as an extension of my own individuality. That’s why I have no desire whatsoever to make mainstream games. I believe that when I create games, it’s extremely important for me to be true to myself. If I’m not, then I fundamentally don’t see the point in doing it. Happiness isn’t just about making money, after all.”
Kimura and company are doing it purely for the love of it, in other words, and nowhere is that more apparent than with the re-release of Moon on Switch last year. Its revival, he says, was the result of “a series of miracles”, beginning with an approach from a producer at Kadokawa who loved the game. “All the ex-Love-de-Lic members supported us. An old hard disk with the source code, thought long-lost, was found. I met an engineer well-versed in both modern development and that of the era when Moon was originally developed,” Kimura says. But the key moment came when he met Undertale creator Toby Fox, whose award-winning RPG had itself been inspired by Moon. “He visited Japan often, so we’d go out to eat, and we even did an interview together,” Kimura recalls. “We’re from different generations, but I really enjoy talking with him. I respect him as a fellow creator and as a friend. During one of his visits, when we were out getting a coffee, he asked me why I wasn’t releasing Moon internationally. I told him at the time there was no way I could, but I think that may have been the point where I started thinking about it seriously. I’m really thankful to him for providing me with that opportunity.”
Indeed, Kimura is grateful that he’s still able to make a living making games, though he admits it’s a precarious time for a small developer such as Onion Games – acknowledging that the studio needs to raise its profile in the west before it makes good business sense to release its games outside Japan. Kimura’s charming Englishlanguage tweets have earned the Onion Games’ Twitter a relatively small but loyal following, while newsletter The Secret Onion Cellar offers behindthe-scenes glimpses at what’s going on at the studio, and giveaways besides – and with work underway on a brand new sandbox RPG (which Kimura claims may well be his last), there’s extra incentive for fans to sign up. Is it working? “Recently I’ve started to see more fans from overseas comment on our Discord and Twitter, so I think I’ll keep trying,” he says. “But we are right on the edge of the stage of western game culture. Please keep supporting us so we don’t fall off!”
“I HAVE NO DESIRE WHATSOEVER TO MAKE MAINSTREAM GAMES… HAPPINESS ISN’T JUST ABOUT MAKING MONEY”