After Being Inspired By Toby Fox To Make His First Rpg In Decades,...

The Undertale-inspired Stray Children, like Kimura's '90s RPG Moon, is part oddball story, part genre commentary.

Yoshiro Kimura seems to only be half kidding when he tells me that he "escaped" from Squaresoft in the mid 1990s, where he'd started his career as a game designer on Romancing SaGa 2 for the Super Nintendo. Even back then, when game studios were a fraction of the size of today's behemoths making Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed, he wanted to work with a smaller team, where his own ideas could shine through.

"Making games, money aside, it's fun, and it needs to be fun to make something fun," he told me over coffee in Tokyo in late September. "With a smaller group of people, you've got all the essential elements to make a game, and they've all got their own special abilities. One is great at art, another is great at programming. And to share the vision, it's a lot less work."

With his John Lennon glasses and a tweed newsboy cap corralling graying sideburns, Kimura is the Platonic ideal of an elder statesman indie dev. His games from the early 2000s, including controversial survival horror Rule of Rose and kissing-based life sim Chulip, have the sort of cult appeal that inspires retrospective YouTube essays and Let's Plays.

But his new game Stray Children, which finally released in English on Steam last week, returns to a genre he hasn't really touched since 1997.

The same year Square achieved stratospheric success with Final Fantasy 7, Kimura and some other ex-Square devs formed what we'd now call an indie studio to create Moon: Remix RPG, a meta commentary on RPGs where you're asked "Why is it OK that this hero is killing thousands of innocent monsters?" It was not quite a hit on Final Fantasy 7's level. The studio disbanded three years later, and Moon wouldn't be released in English until a remaster in 2021.

That remaster—and now Stray Children—both partially exist thanks to an enthusiastic member of Kimura's cult following: Toby Fox.

"I had wanted to make another RPG post-Moon, and I'd been thinking about it for a long time, but making an RPG is not an easy undertaking," Kimura said. "I didn't really have the courage to set off on that journey until I played Undertale, and that gave me that last push that I needed, while I'm still healthy enough to make that climb up the mountain, as it were."

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Kimura became friends with the younger deve

Source: PC Gamer