Lost Sphear, the second game from Square Enix subsidiary Tokyo RPG Factory, is already looking like another treat for fans of older, classic JRPGs. I sat down with studio head and director Atsushi Hashimoto during PAX West to talk about this new game, and the lessons learned from the studio’s debut title, 2016’s I Am Setsuna.
Hashimoto clarified that Lost Sphear is part of an overall project called Project Setsuna, Tokyo RPG Factory’s mission to create story-driven RPGs that trigger strong emotional responses and nostalgia for the “golden years” of JRPGs in players. But he was quick to clarify that these games aren’t part of a set number of titles, like a trilogy, but rather all part of the same umbrella experience.
“I mean, amongst the development staff, yeah we would love to make a trilogy,” he said. “We would talk about it. But we don’t really have a set number of titles. It was more about how we wanted to make games that are so memorable that even 10 years down the line, it’s still fresh in people’s memory and people are still talking about it and remembering it. That was the goal of the entire project, the overall project. So with Project Setsuna or any of the titles within that project, it’s basically the development team members showing our love for the ’90s JRPGs and just trying to harken back to those memorable games. Games that people cannot forget.”
Connected Worlds?
So are the worlds of I Am Setsuna and Lost Sphear connected somehow?
“So in terms of the story and the world, Lost Sphear is not connected with I Am Setsuna. First and foremost, you don’t need to have completed I Am Setsuna in order to enjoy Lost Sphear on its own,” Hashimoto explained. “So, that’s that. However, there are elements that are repurposed almost, like the spritenite. Or the penguin monsters. Those will appear in Lost Sphear. Those are elements that are carried over from I Am Setsuna.
“It’s not necessarily connected but it would be cool if players would take notice of those elements and maybe speculate on like oh how is this connected or have had theories or things like that. We’d love to see that happen,” he added.
Memories Lost
For I Am Setsuna, the theme was sadness. For Lost Sphear, the story is built around the concept of lost memories.
“The Japanese word is hakanai, something that is frail or can disappear very easily,” Hashimoto said. “We had put the term memory as our sort of key word in order to tie that concept in. So a lot of the narrative discusses loss and the memories that are involved in it and memories being lost, et cetera.”
Hashimoto also said that the setting of Lost Sphear was largely driven by feedback from fans, who wanted more variety in the world that the seemingly-endless snowy landscape of I Am Setsuna.
“There was quite a number of feedback that was particularly important,” Hashimoto said. “But if I could bring up one of them, it would be the location. Of course, with I Am Setsuna, most of the field was either blizzard or snow, or just a lot of snow, and there were opinions saying that they would like more variety in terms of scenery. So we tried our best to incorporate many different sorts of elements in terms of environment and tried to take on the challenge of bringing more variety.
“Then in terms of game mechanics, not being able to move during the battle was one of the feedbacks,” he added. “There were people who said that, ‘If I could have moved just a little bit, I could have gotten into the affected area to attack certain enemies.’ So, that was something that we took into consideration. So the characters can move during battle.”
Lost Sphear is coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Steam on January 23, 2018.
