Legendary Japanese Game Developer Returns After Two Decades

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the late 1990s, Yoshitaka Murayama made a name for himself among a subset of video game fans by creating and directing Suikoden, a series of Japanese roleplaying games (RPGs) that became beloved for their scope and depth. A catchy way to think of them is "Game of Thrones" meets Pokemon. But in 2002, as the third Suikoden game was finishing development, Murayama quit his job at the game publisher Konami Holdings and went off on his own. In the two decades that followed, he didn't work on many games of note, leaving fans to wonder what had become of him. Eventually Konami abandoned the Suikoden franchise, perhaps believing that RPGs weren't lucrative enough. In the early 2010s, players started asking Murayama: why not fund a new RPG on Kickstarter?

In the summer of 2020, Murayama finally answered fans' wishes. He raised 481.6 million yen (around $4.5 million at the time) from more than 46,000 backers, with a Kickstarter for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a spiritual successor to the Suikoden series. It became the No. 1 video game on Kickstarter that year. Getting to that point was a long journey, Murayama told me in a recent interview. He said he only started seriously considering a Kickstarter after meeting up with some of his old collaborators, such as artist Junko Kawano, at a concert for Suikoden music. Murayama was also driven by the success of Nintendo's Octopath Traveler, which has sold more than 2.5 million copies since its release in 2018. The audience for turn-based RPGs had been "shrinking," Murayama said, but Octopath Traveler proved that âoethere is a promising marketâ for games like his.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of petrified frosty mugs

[Iamthecheese]

The fundamental problem with RPGs is after all the standard game mechanics are used all you're left with is style, difficulty of play, and sub-mechanics like which attributes the player can modify. It's a set game that has been re-done many times. You can make it more exciting with better assets and better AI but the gameplay is the same. So there are a lot of people out there who want yes, a game like that even though they've played lots of them. But the bar for game quality on delivery gets higher and hig

Re: Imagine a beowulf cluster of petrified frosty

[Rafius]

I am one of the people who bought the new dragon quest and only play in 2d mode. Getting a new rpg has nothing to do with new gameplay mechanics, It has everything to do with an engaging story. Which is what made suikoden fantastic. Being able to pick it up and know exactly how to play without a tutorial is a feature not a lot of current games have.

Re:

[Iamthecheese]

Dragon Quest is awesome, and an illustration of my point. The new one isn't new. DQ 11 was published five years ago and was already dated then. Great execution and popular because of it. An intuitive interface (not that a person could easily actually go from non gaming to playing DQ 11* without any education at all) is one of those features I'm talking about.

*No they damn well couldn't. It uses several different controls that rely on concepts a gamer already has well-embedded but a non-gamer doesn't have a

"Returns"?

[93 Escort Wagon]

When I saw the headline, I assumed he'd completely walked away from game development. But, from the summary text, it's obvious he was still doing game dev... he just wasn't working on a particular set of games, and nothing that'd wow'ed anyone.

So why the attempt to create pseudo-drama? Other than the obvious clickbait-y reasons.

Re:"Returns"?

[rsilvergun]

He's done a little writing here and there but I don't think he's done anything to speak of since alliance alive in 2017. And before that he's basically dropped off the map.

So while he might have been working in the industry I don't think he was involved enough in a project that his own stamp and style would have been noticeable. I mean if you played warriors orochi would you have known he worked on it?

If you're a fan of the Suikoden games from the PS1 and 2 era having him back on full writing duties is a good sign. Doing a successor to that game without him writing would be like a metal gear game without kojima. So clickbait aside it's kind of a big deal that he's working on Eiyuden Chronicles.

I guess you have to be of a certain vintage of gamer though to really understand why it's such a big deal. For the hardcore jrpg fans Suikoden was very much where it was at. Lots of folks were disappointed to see squaresoft and final fantasy 7 take over the industry and less emphasis on complex systems in gameplay with more emphasis on story and graphics. It made the games more accessible, Lord knows Suikoden is dense as hell, but you lost a lot of the almost crpg level complexity

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Thank you for the explanation. I'm not in that hard-core gamer demographic, so it didn't really mean anything to me - but to those of you who are, it sounds like this is real news.

Aren't they like boxers?

[nospam007]

They never come back?

Re:

[Anubis IV]

I had had my fill of the classic JRPG formula at some point in college and left a lot of classics to go unplayed, collecting dust in my backlog. Fast forward a few years and a close friend insisted that I play Suikoden. So, I did. And it was great. It was everything I had loved about JRPGs. Then they sat me down with Suikoden II and I felt like I was being shown that I had never stopped loving the genre. That game was so great on so many levels.

I never did make a full return to playing JRPGs on a regular ba

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