Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka spoke to Real Sound Japan earlier this week about his reasons for leaving Spike Chunsoft – the developer and publisher that originally turned Kodaka’s death game mystery story into a successful multimedia series. In 2017, Kodaka and several other Spike Chunsoft employees left the company to found Too Kyo Games, whose first in-house IP, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, will come to Nintendo Switch in 2025. Some excerpts from the interview, which is in English translated by Automaton, you can see below:
“I didn’t quit Spike Chunsoft out of dislike for the company. We worked together on [Master Detective Archives] Rain Code since I left. The main reason was that I wanted to work on a number of different projects at the same time, including not only video games, but also manga and anime.”
“Instead of forming a huge development team, I wanted to gather a small group of people with the simple idea that we can all continue to make a living as freelancers even if the company goes bankrupt.”
Too Kyo Games became the small group Kodaka wanted, with the composer (Masafumi Takada) and artist (Rui Komatsuzaki) for Danganronpa bringing their talents to the fold. along with Kotaro Uchikoshi, the creator of the Zero Escape series.
Kodaka also wanted to be able to work overtime without being restricted by Japanese labor laws that limit the amount of overtime an employee can work for the company. By becoming executives at their own company, Kodaka and the team were able to sidestep the problem, allowing them to put their heart and soul into their games.
“I, Masashi [sic] Takada (music), Kotaro Uchikoshi (screenplay), and Komatsuzaki (character design) are the directors of the company, so we can work as much as we want.”
It wasn’t all great for the team, the development of The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy actually put Too Kyo Games in debt, but Kodaka believes that they are all capable of working under such pressure and seems to be betting on the success of their upcoming game to get them out of debt. .
