What Is Working With TOSE Like?

TOSE is always lurking in the shadows, secretly developing games. Their portfolio includes Super Princess Peach, The Legend of Starfy, and tons Square Enix ports like Chrono Trigger. This year TOSE is taking care of Active Life: Extreme Challenge for Namco Bandai and we asked the US producer how TOSE did.

Active Life: Extreme Challenge is a sequel to Active Life: Outdoor Challenge which came out on the Wii last year. Namco Bandai Games Japan is leading the project, but they aren’t developing it in house. After Namco Bandai Games America suggested an extreme sports theme to increase appeal overseas the project was handed to TOSE.

“TOSE is a great, great developer,” Chester Vergara, Associate Producer lauded. “We had a game in our hands within months without seeing any sort of prototype.” The build at Namco Bandai’s Editor’s Day where journalists tried furiously stomped on a mat to base jump was near final. I asked Vergara how long TOSE worked on the project. “About six months,” he replied.

“The way games are made in Japan are way different than how we’re used to making games here,” Vergara explains. “Here we’re really heavy on art. There [in Japan] they are heavy on programming and tech. We didn’t see the game until later on and they had a full game before we knew it. It was quite a surprise for us to see that TOSE was really, really good with their design and implementation and they needed no direction whatsoever from us or NBGI.”