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[Our own Brandon Sheffield sat down with Nippon Ichi president and COO Souhei Niikawa and Disgaea team development lead Masahiro Yamamoto to discuss the SRPG-focused company's new PSP game, as well as its philosophy and operating practices.]

For over 15 years, Japanese developer and publisher Nippon Ichi Software has been releasing hardcore-targeted RPGs, particularly strategy RPGs like the successful Disgaea series.

Most recently, the team behind Disgaea has announced its newest game, Zettai Hero Kaizou Keikaku (which Siliconera translates as Absolute Hero Modding Project), a PSP dungeon-crawling action RPG that -- like many other Nippon Ichi games -- features plenty of randomly-generated content.

We talked with NIS president and COO Souhei Niikawa and Disgaea team development lead Masahiro Yamamoto to discuss the small company's attitude toward game development, its RPG success, and why throwing characters is such a big deal in its titles:

Your focus has been on RPGs, particularly Disgaea. Where will you focus going forward?

Souhei Niikawa: Well, RPGs remain a popular genre for the hardcore audience, so I think that RPGs will still be a central part of our strategy.

Disgaea is certainly an important title for Nippon Ichi. We'll continue to grow that game by doing what's best for that particular series. Placing our fortunes on nothing but Disgaea wouldn't be right at all. For example, we want to grow this new game in the same way that we've grown Disgaea. We want to make games that are different from Disgaea, of course, but sell just as well as that.

A lot of Nippon Ichi's character designs have "moe" and "loli" elements. Will that continue? Has for the market for that become smaller?

SN: We made games for the people who play them. If the audience's needs shift away from moe or loli, then we'd certainly go with a different design. We still think there's a demand for that, though, so it will probably continue. From the creator's perspective, we think it's very important to keep trying new things, and as a result, we naturally don't want to stick with any one thing for too long.

What made you adopt that style in the beginning? Did it start out with what the development team liked?

SN: Yes. Well, it's undeniable that a large part of our audience is what people would call game otaku, or hardcore game fans. So we want to make what they want, but at the same time, we're all pretty hardcore too. So, there's that. (laughs)

The first Disgaea really seemed to be designed around picking up and throwing characters. That influenced the rest of the dungeon design and combos in battle. Would you agree with that?

SN: Certainly. Well, not just with Disgaea, but it's been an important aspect of a lot of our games, including this one here. It's been that way from around that time.

It's sort of a Nippon Ichi trademark.

SN: Yeah. We're all about throwing people. (laughs) Using that as a vital tactical tool.

Where did the idea for that come from?

SN: The original task before us was to figure out how this game would be different from the rest. We needed some strong and unique gameplay aspect that would give this project some sort of individual hook. I think it's something that's worked, as you can see how the series has progressed from 1 to 3.

Masahiro Yamamoto: I don't really remember the individual process that led to the pick-up-and-throw idea, but we were coming up with all kinds of ideas to put in the game and make it unique.

The original Disgaea is full of original little ideas like that, but it's undeniable that the throwing system is the idea that stuck out the most in gamers' minds once it came out. It's the result of that kind of thought process.

Just thinking about it by itself, it's hard to conceptualize how it'd be fun. How did you decide that the feature was so important to have?

MY: Well, we're a very small company, and none of the teams behind our projects is particularly large. That structure allows individuals to test out assorted ideas pretty quickly as they come up with them, then show them around to see what the rest of the team thinks.

I don't think that teams the size of what you have for Final Fantasy would be able to try out such risky things within development. I think that's one of the merits of having a small company like ours; it's easier to try new challenges, and that's how a lot of features in our games are born.

You go through a lot of iterations.

MY: I think so, yeah.

How much content is too much for one game? With the item world, you could keep going forever. How do you know when to stop?

SN: I guess you could say it's when we feel like there's nothing left to add to the gameplay.

MY: Oh, we never really stop. (laughs) We put so much stuff into each project, and eventually we get to a point where we ask ourselves, "Do we really need all this?"

When a majority of staffers start answering, "I'm not sure" to that question, that's when we stop. (laughs) That's pretty much how it works.

We really think that having a lot to explore in our games is very important -- especially with the Disgaea series, where it's become kind of a hallmark. Of course, we definitely can't take that approach with all of our titles; instead, we find different ways of making the games engaging and fun to our audience.

I was wondering if you're concerned that if you give too much, there might not be any need to buy sequels.

MY: That's not really much of a worry to us. The way we see it, in fact, most of audience goes through our games pretty quickly, especially the really hardcore people who support the Disgaea series. It's really something, the amount of time they put into playing our stuff. I wouldn't call it a big worry.

Nippon Ichi is pretty much the only game company in Gifu Prefecture. Do you think your company has any regional flavor since you're isolated from other developers?

SN: Well, the Internet is everywhere, and we're a game company, after all, so it's certainly not an inconvenience or anything.

I would say [our flavor] is not in the location so much as our style of company. Since we're kind of out in the country and have small development teams, that helps to add individuality to our games.

In Tokyo, you have a lot of developers who have gone from company to company, quitting one job and picking up another one right off. I think the fact that we've not experienced that as much helps us keep consistent in the sorts of games we release.

Do your staffers come from all over Japan?

SN: Yes. We don't really headhunt from other companies or anything. Sometimes we hire new grads who apply to our company; sometimes we get people who have previous experience with other game companies.

Finally, when you start a new game, from what point do you begin -- an idea, a list of features? What is your jumping-off point?

MY: In the beginning, there's only an outline, a very general idea of what kind of game we want to make -- what kind of world we want, for example. Then things just expand off from there, and eventually we figure out what sort of genre would be best, like how this game turned out to be a dungeon RPG. That's how things begin.

[‘Design Diversions’ is a biweekly new GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Andrew Vanden Bossche. It looks at the unexpected moments when games take us behind the scenes, and the details of how game design engages us.]

When people ask if video games teach us anything, the answer is yes: they teach us how to be better at playing video games. But games also teach us, sometimes subtly, sometimes accidentally, about game design. The choices of design aren’t usually obvious.

Most of the time, it’s enough that a game is fun, or scary, or dramatic, and it’s better to focus the player on the experience rather than how the experience was created. Sometimes, though, an unusual choice of design breaks this rhythm and makes us suddenly conscious of the conventions we take for granted.

One game that unintentionally shares this information (to its determent, unfortunately) is SaGa, a game marketed in the states as The Final Fantasy Legend. The SaGa series is perhaps best known for becoming progressively more obtuse and bizarre with each iteration. Its beginning on the Game Boy, however, was fairly standard for RPGs of its time, asking the player recruits a party of four to do normal RPG things like kill monsters and find treasure.

But this game gives particular insight into enemy design and its incompatibility with player design through an interesting, though flawed, option for players: it lets you play as nearly any enemy in the game.

SaGa is unusual when it comes to the advancement of the game’s three races. Humans grow by buying HP and stats from stores, and mutants grow in random ways after every fight. Monsters, however, advance by turning into different monsters, allowing them to transform into an exact copy of nearly any enemy in the game.

Don’t Eat the Meat

In theory, it sounds very interesting, but because these monsters are designed with the challenges of enemy design in mind, the fundamentally different design requirements that go into creating players and enemies makes the monsters an extremely weak choice to play as. What becomes apparent through play is that their weaknesses as a tool for a player are a result of their strengths as a challenge for the player to overcome.

So what makes monsters so bad? For one thing, monsters tend to do much less damage than anyone else, and they can’t be customized, whereas the humanoid races can be set up with an appropriate breadth of abilities. Monsters can quickly run out of useful skills and then sit around uselessly until you have a chance to rest. They have more HP than anything else, but that doesn’t carry much of an advantage when the other playable races can do so much more damage that there won’t be enough enemies left to damage them.

It doesn’t take a lot of playing to figure out that monsters just don’t feel made for fighting.

The characters the player controls need to be designed to live through dozens and dozens of battles, kill a boss, buy stuff, advance the plot, and still have some wiggle room left over. A monster, on the other hand, is designed to outlast the looping of the battle music. In the seconds of an enemy’s lifespan, it needs to be challenging enough to interest the player but then either die immediately in a satisfying manner or kill players that are doing something wrong.

The Life of a Monster: Nasty, Brutish, and Short

Because of this, a monster is designed with only a brief lifespan in mind. Designers don’t have to worry about the monster before it encounters the party (because it doesn’t exist) or after (because either the player or the monster is dead). Trying to keep one of these things in your party is like trying to get a mayfly to live long enough to earn a PHD from a major research institution.

At first this might seem backwards since monsters have high HP and frustrating immunities, which theoretically would let them survive longer than the races designed specifically for players. But because a monster has relatively weak attacks, they will actually take much more damage than any of the other races because their weak attacks ensure that combat will last longer.

Monsters also aren’t typically equipped with the resources necessary for multiple battles. The other races have the ability to stock up on weapons and attacks, and although they run out eventually, monsters are stuck with what they have. For their tiny lifespan, it’s luxurious, but the game full expects the player to be able to survive extensive periods without rest, and what’s plenty for one battle is nowhere near enough for dozens.

The Making of a Hero

Player HP is low not to make the heroes weak, but to create tension and drama. If the players lose health, they have to be cautious or find ways to recover it. Monsters won’t outlast the fight, so their HP has to come up front. When HP is given to player characters in short increments, the player has a lot more moments of OH MY GOD I’M GONNA DIE. This engages players.

HP is the benchmark of challenge. Monsters must have more and more HP in order to present more of a challenge. HP is less a way for monsters to survive and more a tangible goal for the players to accomplish. The core of RPG gameplay (or really, any game that involves fighting) is to hit this allotted goal of damage before you run out of resources. Challenge and tension depend on this sort of distinctive enemy design.

Conclusions

These principles are by no means limited to RPGs. What if I invented a first person shooter in which you ran from inn to inn shooting waves of monsters? Then I would be sued, because I would have invented Doom. While Doom’s monsters aren’t very resilient, they more than make up for this in numbers that easily overwhelm the total health of the player. In both games, there’s a goal of minimum damage required before you can move on.

In the more “realistic” modern fps, the only change to the fundamental mechanic is even lower player health, a design choice that is as much for dramatic reasons as it is for realism. Nearly every game that involves shooting and killing something controlled by the computer follows this school of design.

This is because enemies aren’t supposed to be lethal. They exist to generate the tension of almost dying, and force the player to find ways to overcome them. SaGa teaches its unsuspecting players that enemies are designed to pose challenges, not overcome them.

[Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance writer and student. He has a blog called Mammon Machine, which discusses videogames and helps mayflies acquire master's degrees, and can be reached at AndrewVandenB@gmail.com]