Ideas Compiled Elsewhere: No Longer with Japan’s #1

There was a mixture excitement and panic when Idea Factory announced they had a new Vita RPG to reveal, one where subsidiary Compile Heart will handle the publishing duties, as they often do. They have their audience, but others regard their titles as bottom-of-the-barrel pap squarely aimed at the otaku audience — specially, the Japanese otaku audience. But that’s not a problem in itself. No, the issue is how the company tries to sell their games through that appeal alone, and their gameplay systems tend to lack depth. Though they’ve been slowly improving, most evident in going from the first Hyperdimension Neptunia game to the second, their games still don’t measure up to their competition.

That’s not to say they don’t make some good games, though. Their otome games and visual novels are quality, but they didn’t start leaving Japan until very recently. But RPGs are a more popular genre, and their work there has been lacking.

But their aforementioned upcoming Vita title might indicate a change, even if you cringed at the teaser art above, hinting at a Neptunia-style all-female cast. This new project shouldn’t be immediately compared to their earlier works because it will be coming from a different team, headed by Masahiro Yamamoto. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, some of the games he worked on will, provided you’re into niche Japanese titles. He worked as main programmer and game designer on many Nippon Ichi Software games, starting with Disgaea 2. From there, he moved on to titles like Disgaea 4, Z.H.P., and The Guided Fate Paradox — the last of which releases in the west next month. It sure seems like NIS lost someone important.

Oh, but the situation gets much more interesting upon reading a little further. A post on NeoGAF says Yamamoto implied that he brought the entire development team with him in the post on Idea Factory’s page. This lends credence to a series of rumors that popped up on popular Japanese bulletin board 2ch back in June, saying there was a sizable exodus of employees from NIS earlier this year. It’s worth noting that this was NIS’ core team, who handled all of their main strategy/RPGs (and other variants), especially the Disgaea games, on an almost annual basis. If that entire team is gone, NIS’ morale has been shot to hell the Netherworld.

How scandalous!

The same source also says half of the team working on the previously-announced (but not shown) Asagi game also left, halting its development. After all these years, Asagi still can’t catch a break.

The final hot tidbit in this drama says staff and executives also departed from NIS America. Some of this we already knew; some former NISA staff established a company called Acttil, who’s assisted with promotion for Little Witch Academia, and is working on the localization for the upcoming Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky for Tecmo Koei.

Here’s another piece of big news for you: Idea Factory has established an American base of operations, Idea Factory International, and confirmed that its CEO is Harusato Akenaga. He was previously, you guessed it, president of NISA. He left over a year ago, and his position was succeeded by Sohei Niikawa. This will guarantee the localization of more Idea Factory games, but it might have dangerous repercussions for the companies who handle them. While Aksys has localized some, like the recently-released otome game Sweet Fuse: At Your Side and the upcoming Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God, some of the bigger ones are handled by…NISA. The Neptunia games have apparently been very profitable for them, and they’ll likely lose those. Things are not looking good.

Not enough bad news about NIS for you? OK. Battle Princess of Arcadias released in Japan last Thursday in Japan, and sales tracker Media Create says it sold under 10,000 copies in the first week. The company has had a tough time making non-Disgaea games that sell throughout this console generation, outside of The Witch and the Hundred Knights. This might be the reason why their Japanese consumer software lineup currently consists of two enhanced ports for Vita.

Meanwhile, their western counterpart is localizing games from other developers, the kinds we haven’t seen from them before. Those are Demon Gaze and DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, a first-person dungeon crawler and mystery-solving visual novel, respectively. NISA wouldn’t touch a visual novel with a ten foot pole before, even if it was developed internally by NIS Japan.

This news doesn’t mean NIS and NISA are going under in the next few months, like some people seem to believe. Idea Factory International will need time to fully establish themselves, and might be limited to assisting other publishers with localizations until they have a good team of their own and distribution partner. After that, NIS better hope they’ve steadied their ship, or they could find themselves treading some incredibly tumultuous waters very quickly.

Well, that, or they’ll be absorbed by Idea Factory. That wouldn’t be a farfetched scenario at this point.