Project Setsuna, that mysterious RPG that Square Enix announced at E3 2015, will be centered around “sadness,” President Yosuke Matsuda recently said in an interview with Famitsu.
While Matsuda didn’t give out any more details on the game’s theme, he did take some time to explain how he views new IPs. Apparently, he believes that developers “need at least three games” before they know if an IP will be a success or not. He explained that the first two games in a series are meant to give developers room to experiment.
Cultivating a new IP is very important. This is my own personal view, but I believe that it is very difficult to immediately build up a big IP. Looking retrospectively at the gaming industry, many games take off or get their big break at their third title. There are cases where the opposite is true of course (Laugh).
But regardless, you need at least three games before you can tell whether an IP is going to be really successful or not. I call this my “Law of Third Titles (三作目の法則)” (Laugh). That’s why for the first and second games, you experiment to a degree where you can still be flexible, and if the series has grown enough to be able to expect a big hit for the third game, you expand the scale. If the third title is successful then all is well.
What that means to Project Setsuna remains to be seen, but we will get a chance to find out when it releases sometime in 2016.
