For many people, the absolute pinnacle of a career is the seat at the top of the table, to be president or CEO of a big international company. What people seldom think of is what happens after you step down. For Sohei Niikawa, who was president of Nippon Ichi Software until three years ago, it’s a chance to start over. This do-over, as he calls it, is one step towards his vision for a happier world.
On a crisp November’s day, Niikawa sat down with me to discuss not only his first game as an indie developer, Etrange Overlord, but how he got here and, most importantly, what comes next.
“So in Japan, we’re calling it a ‘Sushi Lane Musical Action Adventure’,” he tells me, after watching the trailer together. “For the West, we’re calling it a ‘Revolving Lane Musical Action RPG’.”
These sushi lanes carry various power-ups and special weapons to our heroine, Étrange von Rosenburg — a duke’s daughter who was wrongfully accused of treason, condemned to hell and sentenced to death. Waking up after her execution, she finds herself beset by demons. Unperturbed, she sets about conquering Hell so that she can live her best afterlife.
It’s a light-hearted dark comedy that fits perfectly with the franchise Niikawa is best known for: Disgaea.
Sohei Niikawa was producer and writer for most of the Disgaea series to date.
The Disgaea series is set across various Netherworlds, and sees antihero demons embark on humorous stories between rounds of tactical RPG action. Disgaea 7 Complete, which was released earlier this year, is the latest edition of this, and we gave it a whopping 9/10.
“The thing that I really like about Etrange Overlord,” Niikawa said, “is the main character. She has a very free spirit. There’s a lot of overlap between her and I, with me also having begun my own sort of second life after leaving my previous company.
“I’m working really hard in a lot of ways because I want her to be popular.”
Étrange von Rosenburg front and centre in Etrange Overlord
Niikawa-san continues, “This will be the first title that I’m releasing since I started working independently from NIS.” This do-over, as he calls it, also has him starting from scratch as he claims to be in a relatively weak position within the games industry right now. He is, after all, an indie developer releasing the first game he wrote under his new pen name, Roman Kitayama, and his new company, Super Niche.
“I’m working really hard in a lot of ways because I want her to be popular.”
Naturally, that hasn’t stopped him from adding an impressive roster of names to Etrange’s credits.
“In Japan there’s a famous developer called Gemdrops, and the president of this company happens to be the same age as me.” This president famously worked on Niikawa’s first game, Rhapsody: a Musical Adventure. “As soon as he knew that I had left the company, he reached out to me saying he would like to make a game, and so that’s how Estrange Overlord came about.
“This will be the first time we’re making games together in about 30 years! Essentially, Etrange Overload is kind of a mix of that Rhapsody title we first worked on together and Disgaea.”
And this isn’t the only pedigree going into Etrange. “The character designer for the game is actually Shinichirou Otsuka, who’s very famous for his work on the RE:Zero series,” Niikawa adds.
Famous names
The talk of famous names turned our conversation towards Roman Kitayama, the name Niikawa used to pen Etrange Overlord. I asked what this name meant and why he chose it.
“So of course, in Japanese, ‘Kitayama’ can mean a ‘Northern mountain’. And the first place where I built my home was a northern mountain.”
But these are not the kanji Niikawa picked for himself. And in true Japanese fashion, there’s some wordplay at hand. Instead of the obvious 北山, Niikawa chose 喜多山 for Kitayama.
“That’s a really uncool name, dad…”
The Yama bit (mountain) is the same, as a nod towards his home. “But for ‘Kita’, I purposefully used the kanji for both ‘to enjoy’ or ‘to be excited about something’ as well as the kanji for ‘a lot’. So, it means ‘to have a lot of enjoyment’.”
The Roman bit is a bit more complicated. “In Japanese, the phrase romantic doesn’t refer to romantic comedies etc, but more of a classical, romanticised idea — that sense of dreams or the kinds of things that that interest us or excite us.
The problem, however, is that as cool as Niikawa thinks his new name is, the younger generation may disagree.
“My daughter tells me that’s a really uncool name, dad…”
Current games
In the spirit of our regular What We Played column, and because it’s interesting to know what games fuel game makers, I asked Niikawa to name the last game he played that really stuck with him.
The problem, of course, is that Niikawa is working so hard on writing novels and designing games that he can only play games in short bursts — ”I really like games that are very replayable, and I only need to play them for 5–10 minutes, here and there.”
“Solitaire is the game I’m playing most right now! To be honest with you, I never played Solitaire until this year. I’m like ‘Wow, Solitaire is really fun!’ So I’m actually doing a little bit of experimenting on my own right now to see if maybe I can make a game that’s like Solitaire but with a little bit of me in it?”
Starting over
Returning to Niikawa’s career arc, the idea of a career do-over by starting his second life at the same time as Etrange is a beautiful way to look at things.
“I want to take both my failures and my successes from my time at NIS into my second life,” he explains. “I’m in a very interesting situation where it’s kind of like I’m playing a roguelite.
“I’ve jumped in, I’ve built up experience and then I got game over. Now I’m starting over from the beginning, but I get to utilise my experience to drive me forward.”
Those experiences are clear, both in terms of game design and running a company.
“I’m starting over from the beginning, but I get to utilise my experience to drive me forward.”
In terms of game design, the tone is the most obvious thing he is carrying through. The mix of dark underworld vibes with light-hearted tone and at-times slapstick writing is something of a signature for Niikawa.
“There’s a couple of reasons for that,” Niikawa explains, when I asked what draws him to the theme of lighthearted darkness. “One is that there’s not too many other people that tend to do that, but then the other part is just simply because I like it.”
Ultimately, Niikawa says, games are entertainment, and he wants his games to bring people joy. This, he says, drives how he builds his games. They have to be both kind to the user and easy to understand. The problem is that if they’re too difficult to get into, the player won’t get to the bit that makes the game interesting.
“What really gives you a good idea about whether you’re going in the right direction is when somebody sits down to play your game and gets a game over. Do they still want to continue playing despite that?”
“I think what becomes important there is how interesting the story is and how interesting the mechanics are, but also is there a sense of ‘If I just keep going or keep trying a little bit more you know can I get a little bit further?’
“So whenever I’m working on a game I tend to pay close attention to those first two hours of gameplay to see if it meets those requirements: is it kind of the player and is it easy to follow?”
Legacy
It’s difficult to look forward all the time, especially with such an impressive past. We are, after all, we’re all human. And as creators, it’s easy to get caught up in past projects. Not so for Niikawa. When asked if there were aspects of past projects he would revisit, his answer was instant.
“I don’t really think about it that much, to be honest! I don’t focus on the past. I just think about what I’ve learned so far and I build on it to keep making things better.”
So, what does Niikawa think about his legacy, if he’s not one to look over his shoulder?
“For NIS, I feel like the company itself is my legacy. I genuinely think that had it not been for Rhapsody and Disgaea, it wouldn’t exist as the company it is now. I take great meaning from having worked at NIS America and helped to build that company.
“But moving forward with Super Niche, I want my legacy to be more focused around not just games necessarily but all kinds of forms of entertainment.
“I’m 52 years old. I don’t know if I’ll live to be 70 or 80, but honestly right up till the end I want to keep making new content.
“And that could be multiple things — not just games but light novels, manga and board games. There’s a lot of different things that I’d like to work on.”
“I’m 52 years old. I don’t know if I’ll live to be 70 or 80, but honestly right up till the end I want to keep making new content”
Niikawa’s love for entertaining people really shines through as he picked up a Super Famicon cartridge that had been repurposed as a business card holder.
“This is actually an Indie game that’s in development right now,” he tells me. “There’s a man named Yoshitsuna Kobayashi who worked with me on the very first Disgaea, and he’s the person putting this video game together.
“He’s actually already quit the games industry once, but I’ve always thought he is a genius game creator and if he were to disappear from the industry I think it would be a huge blow. So I’ve kind of invited him to sort of come home, as it were, and work with me on making games in the future.
“And I look at that as a very meaningful activity. My greatest desire is actually to fill the world with more and more interesting pieces of media, whether it’s my own works that I’m invested in doing or helping someone else put their work out to the world as a producer.
“Really, behind all of that is just the idea that the more positive things that we can put out into the world for people to enjoy, the better. If people can enjoy them, and if that helps the world become a more peaceful place, nothing could make me happier.”
