Komatsu
Member
Hello, fellow GAFers. Since my old GAF Dev Spotlight thread for Yasumi Matsuno was recently necro-bumped, and it's been a while, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do the #2 thread in this series, this time focusing on Vanillaware's George Kamitani.
A few ground rules I would appreciate if we all could follow:
As a child, Kamitani enjoyed movies, particularly those with special effects and dreamed of filming. However, he was unable to get a camera so he focused instead on video games. The fantasy of the Norse mythology presented in NEC PC-8801 RPG game The Black Onyx impressed Kamitani. This was the first time that he saw anything related to fantasy. As such, it deeply affected the way Kamitami represents the fantasy worlds in his games.
The Black Onyx, the 1984 game that captivated teenaged Kamitani
Kamitani has continued to work in the game industry since high school. Kamitani got into the video game business when he was a senior high school student. One of his friends helped him to get a part-time job as a subcontractor for a video game company and Kamitani continued to work there while going to college until he graduated. As a subcontractor, Kamitani was a 2-D pixel artist for several Famicom games and as a programmer in some MSX games. He convinced his parents to allow him to work part-time by saying it would improve his math skills.
After graduating from college and moving from Hiroshima to Osaka, Kamitani joined Capcom around 1992 because he wanted to learn how to direct a game project. In Capcom, Kamitani was a subordinate of Yoshiki Okamoto, producer of the original Street Fighter II. Akira "Akiman" Yasuda was also Kamitami's boss at Capcom's design department. It was in Capcom where he developed a profound attachment to 2D games as it was the height of 2D arcade games such as Capcom's Vampire, Alien vs. Predator and Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom. Kamitami worked in the last one and it had a lasting effect on his future works. Kamatami's departament worked mostly on action side-scrolling games. He decided to left Capcom because he felt he would never be able to direct a game in the company due to the great amount of talented people that were there already.
After his stay in Capcom, he joined a small game company at the invitation of a former senior classmate. At the end of 1995, while working on Princess Crown, the development company went bankrupt, but thanks to a friend at Sega that introduced him to Atlus, the project was saved, an action for which he is still grateful to Atlus. Atlus would repeat this feat with Dragon's Crown years later. Kamitani then joined Atlus Kansai and was very attached to the Princess Crown team, but, despite being critically critically acclaimed, Princess Crown was not a commercial success due to having been released at the end of the Sega Saturn life cycle and the staff that worked on it wasn't looked upon favorably. Atlus Kansai soon after closed. and the Osaka company Racjin took many of the team members, effectively dissolving the team that worked on Princess Crown.
Princess Crown, SEGA Saturn
Invited to Tokyo by Shigeo Komori, the scenario writer of Princess Crown, Kamitani went to work at Sony Computer Entertainment in confidential projects, where he unsuccessfully tried to do game planning. Kamitani's stay in Tokyo was a bust - steady jobs were hard to come by and he and future Vanillaware programmer Kentaro Ohnishi lived hand-to-mouth as they sought their big break. Eventually it would come: Kamitani would get hired to work on an upcoming MMORPG to be published by Square, Fantasy Earth, and he made enough of an impression to shift the scenario from one of a battle between vampires and humans to a more traditional fantasy setting. Soon after wrapping up the game, he found out that fellow programmer Shigatake was a huge fan of Princess Crown, and invited him to join this new company he was creating.
Fantasy Zero, the game that saved Kamitani from going broke.
In February of 2002 Kamitani founded the video game company Puraguru, the predecessor of Vanillaware. Puraguru worked in Fantasy Earth: Zero. After moving the company to the Kansai area, in the autumn of 2004 Kamitani decided to rename the company to Vanillaware, inspired by the enduring popularity of the ice cream flavor. At the beginning, Shigatake, Kentaro Ohnishi, Takashi Nishii (the only other original member of Princess Crown) and a newcomer from the Fantasy Earth: Zero project joined Kamitani in the new five people company. Five more members later joined the company despite Kamitani's slim reputation at the time.
Due to the reputation gained by Princess Crown by unsuccessful commercially and the fact that Kamitani hadn't made a new game in several years, Kamitani faced difficulties to get funding from Atlus for Odin Sphere, the first game developed by the recently renamed Vanillaware. On top of that, sales of Persona 3 were so strong that Atlus deleayed the release date of Odin Sphere, which was already completed, from 2006 to 2007 to avoid cannibalizing the market. This forced Kamitani to seek new funds, which eventually led to GrimGrimoire with Nippon Ichi Software and Muramasa: The Demon Blade with Marvelous Entertainment. Even so, Kamitani had to personally borrow around 20 million yen by the time GrimGrimoire was completed (which ended up being released before Odin Sphere despite being developed much later), as the company was almost without funds, which caused him great worry for some time.
With the release of Odin Sphere and its success, Kamitani was finally able to embark on what he at some point called the project of his life: 13 Sentinels - Aegis Rim, which was released last year to widespread acclaim. After two decades in the business, one can say that most Kamitami games have a couple of design and gameplay points in common, regardless of genre:
[SOURCE: DRAGON'S CROWN WIKI, WITH INTERPOLATIONS BY KOMATSU AS WELL AS ADDITIONAL RESEARCH]
The list below does include re-releases, remakes or ports.
[/size]
Unlike most other game planners, directors and scenario writers, Kamitani is an extremely accomplished artist, perhaps one of the best in the industry still working regularly to this day. His style is, like that of other giants of the medium such as Akira Toriyama and Tetsuya Nomura (setting his awful fashion sense aside), immediately recognizable and very frequently emulated by the other Vanillaware artists. Here is a sample of some of his work.
Kamitani is a fairly divisive figure among gaming journalists in the West. In Japan, his sheer sense of style and flair for the dramatic is viewed as endearing but here in the lands of setting sun, he is often accused of oversexualizing his female characters. This was particularly the case after the release of Dragon's Crown, for which Vanillaware got a rap to the knuckles and some tut-tuting from the usual gaming journalism watch dogs:
Kamitani seems to have been amused by Schreier's complaint, so he shot back a light-hearted sally:
Unfortunately, this triggered a firestorm of controversy and he ended up apologizing to Kotaku: "While the picture of the dwarfs was meant to be a lighthearted joke, after it became bigger than I thought it would, I reflected on the rashness of it. I am sorry. I have no hard feelings about the article."
Atlus/SEGA seem to have taken this criticism to heart, so not all of his art is brought over when his games are localized. There was a particularly risqué PS4 theme for those who pre-ordered 13 Sentinels in Japan which was not to be found in the West:
A few ground rules I would appreciate if we all could follow:
- Discussions about technical aspects, plot beats, etc. are more than welcome, but let's try to keep it insult and politics-free;
- I have purposefully avoided listing mobile titles and not yet released games - I believe it's better to focus on their dedicated gaming console catalog;
- Feel free to add your content (videos, screenshots, etc.), but let's credit all content creators we mention; and
- I am an adult, gainfully employed enthusiast with just a tiny, tiny bit of experience in the industry and in Japan. I am not a journalist. I do this on my free time to keep this board interesting and engaging - we all love games, after all. No need to drive by and criticize X & Y parts of the write-up if you believe they are inaccurate. Just message me and I will fix it.
As a child, Kamitani enjoyed movies, particularly those with special effects and dreamed of filming. However, he was unable to get a camera so he focused instead on video games. The fantasy of the Norse mythology presented in NEC PC-8801 RPG game The Black Onyx impressed Kamitani. This was the first time that he saw anything related to fantasy. As such, it deeply affected the way Kamitami represents the fantasy worlds in his games.
The Black Onyx, the 1984 game that captivated teenaged Kamitani
Kamitani has continued to work in the game industry since high school. Kamitani got into the video game business when he was a senior high school student. One of his friends helped him to get a part-time job as a subcontractor for a video game company and Kamitani continued to work there while going to college until he graduated. As a subcontractor, Kamitani was a 2-D pixel artist for several Famicom games and as a programmer in some MSX games. He convinced his parents to allow him to work part-time by saying it would improve his math skills.
After graduating from college and moving from Hiroshima to Osaka, Kamitani joined Capcom around 1992 because he wanted to learn how to direct a game project. In Capcom, Kamitani was a subordinate of Yoshiki Okamoto, producer of the original Street Fighter II. Akira "Akiman" Yasuda was also Kamitami's boss at Capcom's design department. It was in Capcom where he developed a profound attachment to 2D games as it was the height of 2D arcade games such as Capcom's Vampire, Alien vs. Predator and Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom. Kamitami worked in the last one and it had a lasting effect on his future works. Kamatami's departament worked mostly on action side-scrolling games. He decided to left Capcom because he felt he would never be able to direct a game in the company due to the great amount of talented people that were there already.
After his stay in Capcom, he joined a small game company at the invitation of a former senior classmate. At the end of 1995, while working on Princess Crown, the development company went bankrupt, but thanks to a friend at Sega that introduced him to Atlus, the project was saved, an action for which he is still grateful to Atlus. Atlus would repeat this feat with Dragon's Crown years later. Kamitani then joined Atlus Kansai and was very attached to the Princess Crown team, but, despite being critically critically acclaimed, Princess Crown was not a commercial success due to having been released at the end of the Sega Saturn life cycle and the staff that worked on it wasn't looked upon favorably. Atlus Kansai soon after closed. and the Osaka company Racjin took many of the team members, effectively dissolving the team that worked on Princess Crown.
Princess Crown, SEGA Saturn
Invited to Tokyo by Shigeo Komori, the scenario writer of Princess Crown, Kamitani went to work at Sony Computer Entertainment in confidential projects, where he unsuccessfully tried to do game planning. Kamitani's stay in Tokyo was a bust - steady jobs were hard to come by and he and future Vanillaware programmer Kentaro Ohnishi lived hand-to-mouth as they sought their big break. Eventually it would come: Kamitani would get hired to work on an upcoming MMORPG to be published by Square, Fantasy Earth, and he made enough of an impression to shift the scenario from one of a battle between vampires and humans to a more traditional fantasy setting. Soon after wrapping up the game, he found out that fellow programmer Shigatake was a huge fan of Princess Crown, and invited him to join this new company he was creating.
Fantasy Zero, the game that saved Kamitani from going broke.
In February of 2002 Kamitani founded the video game company Puraguru, the predecessor of Vanillaware. Puraguru worked in Fantasy Earth: Zero. After moving the company to the Kansai area, in the autumn of 2004 Kamitani decided to rename the company to Vanillaware, inspired by the enduring popularity of the ice cream flavor. At the beginning, Shigatake, Kentaro Ohnishi, Takashi Nishii (the only other original member of Princess Crown) and a newcomer from the Fantasy Earth: Zero project joined Kamitani in the new five people company. Five more members later joined the company despite Kamitani's slim reputation at the time.
Due to the reputation gained by Princess Crown by unsuccessful commercially and the fact that Kamitani hadn't made a new game in several years, Kamitani faced difficulties to get funding from Atlus for Odin Sphere, the first game developed by the recently renamed Vanillaware. On top of that, sales of Persona 3 were so strong that Atlus deleayed the release date of Odin Sphere, which was already completed, from 2006 to 2007 to avoid cannibalizing the market. This forced Kamitani to seek new funds, which eventually led to GrimGrimoire with Nippon Ichi Software and Muramasa: The Demon Blade with Marvelous Entertainment. Even so, Kamitani had to personally borrow around 20 million yen by the time GrimGrimoire was completed (which ended up being released before Odin Sphere despite being developed much later), as the company was almost without funds, which caused him great worry for some time.
With the release of Odin Sphere and its success, Kamitani was finally able to embark on what he at some point called the project of his life: 13 Sentinels - Aegis Rim, which was released last year to widespread acclaim. After two decades in the business, one can say that most Kamitami games have a couple of design and gameplay points in common, regardless of genre:
- All Vanillaware games make use of rasterized line-art instead of sprites. Without exception. They all look amazing, but this is a bit of a pity - his pixel art in Princess Crown was amazing.
- With the notable exception of Grand Knights History and Dragon's Crown, most VW games have fixed protagonists over which the player has a very limited degree of customization.
- Genre-bending and mix-and-matching are his forte: you have Action RPGs mixed up with platformers, Tactic RPGs with an online "capture X flag" mode, Visual Novels with Tower Defense as an integral part of the gameplay.
- Finally, most of his games feature female characters either as protagonists or as prominent characters in the story.
[SOURCE: DRAGON'S CROWN WIKI, WITH INTERPOLATIONS BY KOMATSU AS WELL AS ADDITIONAL RESEARCH]
The list below does include re-releases, remakes or ports.
[/size]
Unlike most other game planners, directors and scenario writers, Kamitani is an extremely accomplished artist, perhaps one of the best in the industry still working regularly to this day. His style is, like that of other giants of the medium such as Akira Toriyama and Tetsuya Nomura (setting his awful fashion sense aside), immediately recognizable and very frequently emulated by the other Vanillaware artists. Here is a sample of some of his work.
Kamitani seems to have been amused by Schreier's complaint, so he shot back a light-hearted sally:
Unfortunately, this triggered a firestorm of controversy and he ended up apologizing to Kotaku: "While the picture of the dwarfs was meant to be a lighthearted joke, after it became bigger than I thought it would, I reflected on the rashness of it. I am sorry. I have no hard feelings about the article."
Atlus/SEGA seem to have taken this criticism to heart, so not all of his art is brought over when his games are localized. There was a particularly risqué PS4 theme for those who pre-ordered 13 Sentinels in Japan which was not to be found in the West:
Questions:
- So, GAF, what are your favorite Kamitani games?
- What memories do you cherish?
- What do you think of his career?
- What do you believe the future holds for him?
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