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With Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness and The Witch and the Hundred Knight finally complete, Siliconera caught up with Nippon Ichi Software president Souhei Niikawa to find out about the company’s future titles starting with Criminal Girls for Vita.
Niikawa-san, our readers are really curious to why you choose to remake Criminal Girls for Vita.
Souhei Niikawa, President: In Japan, there were hardcore fans who wanted a continuation of the story. I want to continue it on as a series and keep building it. Our first process in building it up is building it on Vita and I wanted to touch the girls on Vita. [laughs]
On the topic of Vita, what are you going to add to Disgaea 4: Return, the PlayStation Vita version?
What was DLC in the PlayStation 3 version will be in the game at start.
After Disgaea D2 came out in Japan you announced Disgaea 4 for Vita. Are you thinking about synchronizing releases in the future like if Disgaea 5 came out it would be released for Vita and PlayStation 3 or 4.
As of right now, we don’t have any plans of doing a simultaneous release on console. If we do a simultaneous release on console and handhelds, some of the things that are unique to the handheld version, for example the traveling feature in Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention, the game would only sell on handhelds which would be bad for us.
From our standpoint, since portable devices aren’t really doing well outside of Japan. It’s better for us to release the game on console first because consoles do well in and outside of Japan and then go from there.
If we were just thinking about Japan we could probably just release all of our games on handheld devices, but we we want our fans outside of Japan to enjoy the games as well, which is why we want to release the games on consoles.
The Witch and the Hundred Knight seems to have sold well in Japan, but the game had a long development cycle. Did the sales meet Nippon Ichi’s expectations?
We reached the initial amount that we wanted to sell. However, we are still in the red. [laughs]
Are you thinking about going back to the concept of an open ended game?
Initially, we wanted to make The Witch and the Hundred Knight an open ended world. Where we stand now, we don’t have the manpower as a company to make a game like that yet. If it was going to be open world it probably would have taken another three years. [laughs]
Where do you want to take the Disgaea series next? Can you give us a keyword or a concept for Disgaea 5?
[Laughs] I don’t know if I can say it yet… We have started working on it. What I can say now is we want Disgaea to appeal to a broader audience so we can expand our fanbase beyond the niche audience we have now. We are working on a story that can be enjoyed by a wider user base as well as different characters that will be enjoyed by them.
