A former Sony developer has straightforwardly claimed that Sony is no longer interested in making Japanese RPGs.
That developer was Akifumi Kaneko, who was producer of Sony’s Wild Arms RPG series. The game series was popular enough to get five numbered games, two spinoff games, a manga and twenty-two episode anime. Akifumi has now launched a Kickstarter for a spiritual successor to his series, called Armed Fantasia: To The End Of The Wilderness. in a joint crowdfund with Penny Blood, itself also an independent spiritual successor to RPG series Shadow Hearts. While Shadow Hearts franchise were mainly owned by defunct developer Sacnoth, Wild Arms was fully owned by Sony.
Now, in this interview, Kaneko was asked about prior statements that Japanese RPGs like Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts are no longer as popular as they used to be. Here is his full statement:
“Of course there are still very popular JRPGs like Persona 5, but with Persona 5 that’s the fifth installment. If it’s a part of series that already has a first game, it’s alright, but when it comes to making a new JRPG, Japanese publishers just won’t take the risk. In my case, I went to Sony over and over again, but nothing came of it. It’s not so much that JRPGs aren’t popular, its that publishers won’t let us make them.”
Kaneko’s statement does seem incomplete as it does not address the question on why Sony has stopped work on Wild Arms. But, it isn’t hard to fill those gaps, as last year Sony shutered Japan Studio, the Japanese arm of PlayStation first party game development that had made exclusives for Sony’s platforms for nearly thirty years. Japan Studio’s more recent projects, like Gravity Rush 1 & 2, had performed so poorly that the company could no longer justify keeping the studio around. The company had reorganized its first party development under PlayStation Studios, with Team Asobi being the sole remaining Japanese studio.
The PlayStation does continue to get a healthy smattering of RPGs from its third party partners, like the Persona games from Atlus and the Final Fantasy series from Square Enix. However, the upcoming rerelease of the first two Suikoden games from Konami, which were originally released for PlayStation in the 1990s, hints at what has been Sony’s attitude to the genre. They welcome third parties bringing RPGs of all kinds to them, but don’t take particular attention to their continuation or legacy.
At least for now, Kaneko has a proposed alternative to waiting on big publishers like Sony, which is for fans to pick up the slack themselves. Armed Fantasia: To the End of the Wilderness is in development for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC. You still have a few days to contribute to its joint Kickstarter with Penny Blood here.
Source: Gematsu
