In Part I of this blog post series, we talked about how the idea for SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair was initially planted and in Part II, we then delved into how it slowly blossomed from there. Today, we’re going to once again continue from where we left off and talk a little about how, despite my personal excitement about the project, I was really unsure how it’d be perceived by others…
- Worries
Saku was going to be something very different from what we’ve done before: a shorter kinetic story primarily focused on the characters.
There wouldn’t be a murder mystery to solve this time and generally no gameplay elements like investigating or presenting evidence.
Heck, there wouldn’t be much interactivity at all (except for one singular, relatively insignificant choice I added later on).
Instead, this project was intended to be a visual novel in the truest sense of the term.
This was mainly done to keep development as short and simple as possible. After taking eight whole years for GENBA no Kizuna, I kinda wanted to see if we could manage to complete Saku within a significantly shorter time span, so that fans wouldn’t have to wait too long again for our next release (and so that we wouldn’t take so long again to add another one to our portfolio… “orz).
However, in keeping things so simple, we were obviously stripping away a lot of what had drawn players to our projects in the first place and what they had enjoyed about them in particular.
If you look at the reviews, the main reason the original SHINRAI is liked is the murder mystery aspect, not the character work.
And when you look at the reception for GENBA, it’s clear that people really enjoyed the increased amount in interactivity.
Therefore, I worried if anyone would actually be interested in this little “experiment”. Especially since the reactions to GENBA had already shown that, while players had certainly enjoyed it, many had missed the spooky vibe of Broken Beyond Despair and would have preferred something much more akin to it. Plus, while some did love the increased focus on “character drama”, others seemingly saw it as more of a nuisance that distracted from the mystery.
So yeah, since there had already been a notion regarding our previous project that it hadn’t been exactly what a lot of people had wanted/expected it to be, taking away the interactivity, doubling down on the character drama, making it the sole focus by not even providing a murder case or really a proper mystery to solve at all this time… well, it all just felt like I was setting Saku up for disaster.
Nevertheless, it was what I personally wanted to do. The story I wanted to tell. And so, I stuck to my vision and ultimately worked on it with the mindset of simply creating it for myself, rather than anyone else. But of course, that doesn’t mean I could just blend out the worries. On the contrary, I was truly concerned about alienating even more fans with this move, ahahah…
So, the very least I wanted to do was to temper expectations and really hammer home how different Saku was going to be in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes I had made with GENBA. But I guess the marketing phase will be our topic for next time, so…
Until then, please enjoy the rest of your weekend, have a very spooky time and, as always, take care ^w^
