――Which brings me to my next question. How many times was the original Hero phone app downloaded?

Mr. Masuda: I honestly don’t know the exact numbers myself, but I heard it wasn’t bad. However, that was around the time when everyone was starting to switch from mobile to smartphones, so that most likely affected those numbers. At that point, there were still a lot of people who didn’t already have mobile phones, so…

――I see. That’s true, though. The switch did start happening around 2009.

Mr. Masuda: So people who really liked new things didn’t really have a chance to play it during that period. And in that sense, it was kind of a waste, you know? Because I think that Hero is the kind of game that people who like new things would be interested in.

――Even though it’s targeted towards early adopters, as well.

Mr. Masuda: Apparently it had a bad smell to it. Like it might be a shitty game or something.

――I wouldn’t go quite that far, myself. But it certainly is a game like no other.

Mr. Masuda: This makes me remember what Famitsu said about Hero during its development. Misosa Suzuki wrote things like, “It’s an RPG that only gets weaker as the story goes on”, and “What would you think of a game where the protagonist dies only an hour into things?” -- things of that nature. Within the manga itself, there was a punchline that more or less said that. And then during production, we’d say, “no, really, that’s the kind of game we’re making”. So I guess that everyone felt the same way about that.

――You mean, you were making a game that was more or less a punchline in a manga? [laughs]

Mr. Masuda: Yes, exactly. [laughs] But anyone can come up with a story. Not everyone can make that story, or punchline, into an entire game. Which would end with an, “oh, you’re joking, right?” sort of response. Who would want to buy a game made on that whole premise? It sounds like that would hurt, in a way. And yet, that’s exactly what we did. But in order to make such an entertaining, fun game you’d want to pay for, I feel that it’s very important to consider how it was created, or how the game design was conceived. Because I feel that Hero was appropriately stoic, it’s masochistic that way as well, to the user playing it.

――Pardon this rather selfish thought of mine, but I believe that any of your games, whether it be Oreshika or Linda Cube, usually has a stoic world view and game design as a result.

Mr. Masuda: I kind of got sick of working with royal road RPG genre systems after working on both Tengai Makyou II: Manji Maru and Momotaro Densetsu: Peach Boy Legend after two or three years each respectively. I was working on scripts for both of them at the time.

――And that was your reaction to being sick of things?

Mr. Masuda: Was I sick of it? Maybe it’s better to say that perhaps putting a bit of stress on gamers can also be great entertainment and isn’t such a bad idea, broadly speaking. It’s a very adult way of thinking. It feels like when you eat a bitter fish liver. That is to say, it’s delicious in a way you never thought possible as a child.

――It’s for adults who can recognize the delicious taste of bitterness, then.

Mr. Masuda: That’s right. Because that’s about around the same time I started to enjoy games like that, when I became an adult. I started to make games for people older than middle school students at about that time as well.

I came up with material for like-minded enthusiasts and other stoic things like that, but those turned out to be titles like Hirai Oji’s Tengai Makyou and Akira Sakuma’s Momotaro Densetsu. But because those games were (and still are) being sold under their personal brands as creators, I soon started to think things over and came up with the common denominator was that they used this idea of creating games oriented towards adults first and foremost. I found that idea really interesting and I ran with it.

Unfortunately, ideas you want to use just kind of keep piling up over time. After I made Tengai Makyou: ZIRIA, I left the advertising firm I’d been working for with a head full of ideas. After that, I started to make games oriented towards adults. By the way, I never got any appearance fees or anything for making ZIRIA or Momotaro or METAL MAX.

――Really?!

Mr. Masuda: I was still only an advertising firm employee at the time, so I only worked overtime.

――Oh, I see…


Mr. Masuda: Yes, as a company employee I did go to the game development site to help out. At the time, Mr. Sakuma and Mr. Hiroi were making children-targeted games, mostly for the kids that read Shounen Jump magazine. That sort of demographic. But it was still largely a business that was targeting young people in their teens and early twenties. The closer I was able to get to things and really start looking at them, by the time I left the firm and became independent, I decided I didn’t want to compete in that same market nor class. I thought that it wasn’t a great idea for me to go ahead and start competing on that same level and in those same areas.

When you make a game that clashes with another game of the same genre near their release date, it’s very awkward. So I thought it would be better to make something different so that even if it were to clash with another game, the target demographic would be completely different, and that might diffuse some of the awkwardness that might result.

――I see.

Mr. Masuda: I mean, it was like seeing an elite businessman, you know, the type hanging around Marunouchi? Holding an issue of Jump in one hand and a copy of the Nikkei newspaper in the other while he rides the Chuo line in the morning.

――One might say that’s a perfect way, to sum up what a businessman is; a clash of Jump versus Nikkei.

Mr. Masuda: On a Monday morning. And at that point, there hadn’t been a mobile phone where you could watch the news on it yet, either.

――And now everyone is either watching or looking at something on their smartphones, and you can’t really guess the content they’re consuming at a glance. I think everyone was starting to see signs and omens of change in that era, to a certain extent.

Mr. Masuda: It’s a startlingly precise definition of things, right? But only because I came out of that market. [laughs]

――Right? Being involved in a royal road RPG has created a foundation to reverse-engineer things, so you could say I have a pretty firm idea of how it all works.

Mr. Masuda: The Lanchester [marketing] Strategy, right? I read about it in school as a kid, and if you’re a newcomer to the business, it’s like trying to get beyond first place in a really narrow field, and only then thinking about the future.

An example would be something like this: there’s a tofu maker in town, right? And they want to be the best. So after firmly establishing the brand there, then you have to start thinking bigger. You start thinking about atsuage fried tofu and soy milk. You take those ideas and you spread them in the next town. And on and on it goes from there.

――Because you have the best thing, you start thinking that other [related] things Mr. Masuda: Bingo. Did you know about how tofu has laws and statutes related to it?

――Tofu has laws connected to it?

Mr. Masuda: Because tofu as a product has no single national production company, it is regulated instead by law. So mostly it’s a matter of prefectures deciding whether or not to expand the scale of those laws.

――I actually didn’t know about this. I didn’t know I’d be learning about law and tofu by doing this interview today. [laughs]

Mr. Masuda: My interview’s probably going to be a nightmare to put together. [laughs]

――[laughs]

※Note: In Japan, tofu (fermented bean curd) is a popular food deeply rooted in the lives of Japanese people. The law that surveillances and restricts entry of new companies is called the Sector Coordination Law (分野調整法, Bunya Chouseihou) in order to secure opportunities for SMEs.

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