Oprainfall had the honor to sit with Robbie and Alan from NISA to discuss their upcoming titles such as Pyscho-Pass and other future projects at GDC 2016.
When did Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness get on NISA’s radar?
Alan: It wasn’t part of the discussion at first, but at last year’s TGS it was brought up in a conversation with our execs and their licencing company.
The game was originally an Xbox One exclusive and then ported over to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita; do you know what led to the console change?
Alan: I have no clue, but I have a feeling that it was just a timed exclusive and they always had the intention to put it on something else. Although, that is my personal opinion.
Do you know if there will be cross-save functionality between the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita versions?
Robbie: Unfortunately, there is no cross-save.
Does your team find it more difficult to work on a visual novel with a lot text as opposed to a different genre?
Robbie: Yea, it’s very text heavy, our translation and editing team is always trying to make sure that the English translation is very similar to the Japanese text.
Alan: The biggest issues we come across are consistency issues, like, how did we do this here and how can we approach this the same way. Because of the volume of text we have to keep that quality control really tight.
Do the characters in the game have the same tone, emotion and humor found in the Anime?
Alan: Oh yea and it is fully voiced by the original Japanese anime voice actors.
Will there be an English dub?
Alan: No, there is only the Japanese dub.
There was a companion app released on mobile phones for the PlayStation 4 version in Japan, will that also make it’s way over?
Alan: We are looking into it. We do know about it and are going to see what we can do.
There was a Limited Edition of Psycho-Pass released in Japan, what do you guys have planned for the localized version?
Alan: We are working on that now so please stay tuned.
With the success of Danganronpa, do you see and increase in interest of visual novels in North America?
Alan: The market is definitely starting to come around. I began working in the video game industry 4 or 5 years ago [and] my head office actually makes quite a few visual novels every year in Japan and they were always like “Why don’t you guys do this one?” and we’d say “Well, we’d have to think about it”, but ever since the popularity of games like 999 and Danganronpa we’ve seen the increase in gamers who want those story experiences. That really helps our decision on what games we should bring over.
Speaking of Danganronpa, do you have any future plans with Danganronpa 3?
Alan: There’s always a possibility, but we haven’t announced anything about Danganronpa 3.
Criminal Girls 2 was teased at your most recent press event, what kind of reception have you received since the tease?
Alan: To be really honest, fans just don’t want it to be censored.
Robbie: That’s pretty much the common comment.
So what do you guys think? Is it going to have to go through any changes?
Alan: We are talking to ESRB now to see if there’s anything we have to do, but we do want to be transparent with that. If there’s anything that needs to be changed fans will know from the very beginning that this is what happened, this is why we did it, and this is what’s changed.
There was a comment made about the PC port of Criminal Girls that NISA doesn’t want an unrated game on Steam, is that true?
Robbie: I believe our executive made that comment and he just wants to make sure that all our titles go through the proper channels.
Why did you decide to do two different Limited Editions of Grand Kingdom?
Alan: We originally just wanted to get the game out to as many people as possible so we thought a general LE release would be cool, but then we decided that a super crazy edition would work for this game. It doesn’t work for every game, but Grand Kingdom is pretty special.
With The Firefly Diary you released an exclusive physical edition on your online store, do you plan on doing that with Yomawari Night Alone?
Alan: I would totally be up for that, but we’ll see.
Thank you for reading and if you have any questions or comments please post them below!
