Reef Entertainment kindly invited NookGaming and some other outlets to London to check out some upcoming NIS America titles as part of their press tour. Alongside that, we had the chance to chat with some key staff from NIS America, one of whom graciously granted us the opportunity for an interview.
Interview with Nicholas Odmark
NookGaming
Just as a starter, could ask you to tell us a little about yourself and what you do for NIS America?
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
Sure. So, my name is Nick Odmark. I am part of the PR marketing team for NIS America. Specifically Media Relations Coordinator. So as part of the marketing team, I’m responsible for executing the marketing campaigns and activities for individual titles along with the rest of my team. But then as far as the granular breakdown of my exact position, I communicate with a lot of press, fans, and first-party distribution partners like Reef Entertainment, getting them trailer assets, support requests for trailers and review codes, press opportunities like this, that sort of thing.
NookGaming
While all the other games that NIS America and Reef Entertainment are showing us today are from established series. CRYMACHINA is the exception. With a new title such as this, how would you approach convincing fans to give it a try?
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
There are a lot of ways we do that. For titles, kind of like Rhapsody or Nayuta, the first time to the West is a big deal. When we’re able to bring titles to the West that haven’t necessarily been here before, we know we have established fan bases. That always helps because again, there are people that are anticipating those games or have been for quite some time.
Otherwise, certain games have demos, which is obviously a very traditional way of doing so. And we try to make it clear when those games do. Here’s a demo. We’ll usually do a demo trailer. We’ll usually do a demo live stream as well, just to be able to alert people that a demo is present for the set title. But as far as individual marketing activities, we’ve been doing a lot more live streams lately. Traditionally we do a launch stream for every single title on the day it launches, but we’ve been finding different ways in which to justify streams earlier in a marketing campaign just to try and get eyes on it sooner. And we found those are a great way of just showing people kind of a deeper diving gameplay than trailers will provide. Getting a lot of positive reactions for kind of these streams around specific titles, getting people an earlier look at them so that they can determine on their own whether or not they’d like to give it a shot.
NookGaming
When did you do the live streams, are there any sort of particular types of gameplay you try to highlight? For example, some people don’t like to go through a lot of cutscenes and such.
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
When doing press opportunities like this and then in live streams as well, there are times when starting the game from the beginning makes sense because we want to provide people with the full context of the story or we just feel like starting the game from the beginning is a great way to jump into it. But there are times when we feel that starting it from a little later in, maybe a save that’s prepared a couple of chapters in or a few hours in is more beneficial just because we can show off more features, avoid story spoilers that maybe we haven’t talked about publicly yet, that kind of thing. Yeah, we definitely are cognizant of what would we like to show off, and based on that, what point in the game should we go to in order to show off these things or these features?
NookGaming
So regarding Disgaea 7, while, I personally enjoyed Disgaea 6, it didn’t really seem to achieve as positive a response of fans as some of the other Disgaea titles. Could you share some of the lessons learned from Disgaea 6’s reception and how it influenced Disgaea 7?
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
Sure. Disgaea 7’s development, it definitely took fan feedback into account. That was something that NIS moved forward with very purposely, and in doing so, one of the core development tenets was a return to our roots, and that was taken into account from everything in regards to the story, the world, the characters, and the gameplay mechanics. What returning mechanics can we change or do we want to change in order to accomplish this? What new mechanics are we introducing? Or why do we feel that this new mechanic is a return to the roots of what makes Disgaea Disgaea? So all of that was taken into account in developing the game, as was developing a game in this series that can appeal to both new fans and returning fans. There was a lot of effort in Disgaea 6 to appeal to new fans of the series just because the series had been going on for some time now. We wanted to make sure that we could convince people who maybe hadn’t played all of the previous titles or most of the previous titles to jump on board. But in doing so, NIS realized that maybe we had changed a few things that made veteran players happy with the series and so there’s been an effort as well to find a way to balance attracting new players and existing players within the current features, both returning features that have been adjusted and new features that have been added.
NookGaming
Are there any particular features that you personally enjoy in Disgaea 7?
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
Yes. So Jumbification is probably the main one. That’s obviously a new feature to the Disgaea 7. This is the ability for enemy units and your own units to grow to a large, almost kaiju level in height. What this does is your unit then stands at the edge of the stage and they’re able to do one of two things. Either deal large area of effect attacks on enemy units on the stage, or they’re able to attack other Jumbified units, which is known as a gig disaster attack. There’s a strategy that’s involved in Jumbification on top of the fact that it just looks really fun and fits the very over-the-top tongue-in-cheek nature and humor of Disgaea, in that every character who is Jumbified also has Jumbilities. These are abilities that are only active when a character is Jumbified, and they don’t always just apply to the character that’s in Jumbified. They can also apply to all of your units on the stage. So for instance, if, say, one of the Jumbilities of a character is that their attack gets boosted when they’re Jumbified, that will also apply while they’re Jumbified to all of your characters on the stage as well.
That’s definitely a fun one just because of the sheer… I feel like it just fits the tone of the series very well and what the series goes for, which is over-the-top fun. You always hear about this stuff and you think, “Oh, that’s going to break the game”, then you play and you go, “Oh, no. Okay, they thought of different ways to implement it”. The other reason why I like it too, is that another core tenet of developing the game, was that it takes into account player movement, in so far as that when you Jumbify a unit, they’re able to attack any unit anywhere on the stage. That was definitely taken into account during the development of it.
Another feature that I really like is Hell Mode. It’s a little more simple than Jumbification. Essentially, certain characters in the game have a Hell Gauge that you can charge through doing certain things in combat with each character. The best way to charge that Hell Gauge is different per character. For Fuji, for instance, attacking enemy units from behind charges the Hell Gauge faster. Once it’s fully charged, you can activate Hell Mode, which again, for Fuji specifically unlocks a special called Divine Kanzan and just deals a tremendous amount of damage with a really fun and flashy animation that I like a lot.
Those are probably my two favorite ones so far. I think they’re both the ones that translate, I guess, visually the most during gameplay. But another fun one as well is item reincarnation. I know we didn’t show that off today, but essentially items can now be reincarnated in Disgaea 7. What that means is that the previous characteristics of an item are retained. So for instance, if you change a weapon into a piece of armor, it’s going to retain the characteristics that it had as a weapon, but now you can level up an entirely different upgrade path that’s more specific to armor. So essentially, you can create these really unique item sets that have all these crazy characteristics and stat boosts and stuff that have nothing to do with what that item is, which again, fits into the whole theme of goofyness over the top that Disgaea is known for.
NookGaming
Just to clarify on item reincarnation, can you reincarnate all items in Disgaea 7 aside from the divine weapons? And can you reincarnate items more than once?
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
Yes, as long as you max out the level of an item first.
NookGaming
Moving on to another title, we enjoyed playing a little of The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails today. But could you share a little about the reasons behind the decision to localize it, considering that it’s now over a decade old?
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
I don’t know personally about the decision to localize it. That being said, I can say that we are excited to bring it to the West properly for the first time, just on multiple platforms, that is. This is a title that is different from the Legend of Heroes series proper, as well as Ys. That being said, it has some similarities to both. And so we do think it’s a unique experience compared to other Falcom titles. And bringing it to the West is something we’re excited about. But as far as the decision behind localizing, I wouldn’t know that.
NookGaming
This is a question that I often see asked, but could you share why the EU release dates were always slightly later than the NA release dates for NIS America releases, while simultaneous Western releases are quite common these days with many publishers?
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
I don’t know that. I believe it depends on individual titles, but I do know that recently there’s been a big push to have global PC releases. Again, probably just because of the nature of the platform. But as far as the details of why, I’m not entirely sure. It usually just depends on individual titles, really. Because some of our titles, both past and then present and upcoming, some of them have simultaneous releases, whereas others don’t. So it depends from what I understand.
NookGaming
Just to close with a light question, is there a NIS America title that you personally love but you feel didn’t really get as much attention as it deserved?
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
I’ve been with the company for about a year and a half now, so I’ve been coming up to speed with a lot of our past titles. Granted, I’ve also joined at a time in which we’ve been publishing more titles than ever before. And so I’ve, thankfully, been able to experience a lot of different ones.
One that initially didn’t get a lot of eyes on it, but critically, it did very well was GrimGrimoire OnceMore. We recently released that. This is a Vanillaware title. GrimGrimoire, the original game released on the PlayStation 2 right at the end of the console’s life cycle in April of 2007. Because of that a lot of people missed out on it just because they’d either transition over to PS3 or it’s just at the end of the life cycle, so there were games that they were catching up on their backlog. Yet it got a lot of critical attention. People seemed to respond very positively. So being able to rerelease GrimGrimoire OnceMore was a big deal for us. We were very excited about giving people that missed out on the opportunity but were interested in it to play it. There were a lot of people going, “I’m interested in this game, but I don’t own a PS2 anymore. It’s very, very difficult to find”. And so being able to rerelease it for those people specifically was really rewarding. I got to play it a little bit. It’s very much like a classic RTS-type game, which I enjoyed because you don’t see a lot of those anymore. But you mixed with the magical student in a school type of thing, which again, you don’t see a ton either in media anymore. But yeah, that was one that I was very excited to see that the reception to that was positive. Showing it off to the press last year was a lot of fun.
Another one that as far as a personal favorite so far… It’s actually been doing quite well, and this series is pretty popular dating back to arcades, but I’ve really enjoyed both Raiden titles, Raiden III X Mikado Remix and Raiden IV X Mikado Remix.
I’m kind of a sucker for those arcade-style games because I remember playing them as a kid a long time ago when my family and I would go out to get pizza. There was a pizza joint we’d go to that had three arcades and almost always one of them was a top-down shooter. One of them was almost always Area 51 and then one was Big Buck Hunter. But of the Raiden ones I’ve enjoyed a lot just because these releases specifically… Especially Raiden IV X Mikado Remix brings a lot of new game modes to the table. Both games feature the ability to listen to the old soundtrack and then the new completely remixed soundtrack for both titles, which has been a lot of fun to go back and listen to what a track sounded like and then go to the new one and hear how much live music they composed in it. Double play is a really fun feature in both of those as well where it’s single-player, but you’re controlling two ships at the same time on the consoles with different joysticks. That’s been a really really fun one. We actually just did a competition stream, a tournament stream with Reef, where we played both Raiden 4 and Raiden 3 and compared our scores and stuff. That was a lot of fun doing that with them.
I remember everything we released this last year and a half, it’s been a lot. It’s a lot of stuff. I’d say probably a GrimGrimoire. The original release, just didn’t get a lot of attention because of the circumstances of its launch window. But it’s been nice to see people’s reactions to that
NookGaming
Has it been doing well since the recent re-release?
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, that one was a lot of fun. The limited edition for that one was really fun too. The store team had a lot of fun coming up with the items for that, I think, the additional things and stuff.
NookGaming
I will say I’m always very impressed with the limited editions from NIS.
Nicholas Odmark – NIS America
I’ll tell them that. They’ll be very appreciative. The design team works together and comes up with items to include. And I can tell you there’s a lot of thought put into what they’re going to include and how it thematically relates to the title. When those decisions are able to be made, they put a lot of thought into it. So they’ll appreciate that. Thank you. Okay.
NookGaming
I think that’s all the questions I have. Thank you for your time.
If you would like to read more interviews, how about checking out our chat with Tentai Books, a light novel publisher? Or perhaps you’d like to check out our early impressions of Disgaea 7?
Many thanks go to Reef Entertainment and NIS America for access to this event. As a disclaimer, Reef Entertainment provided a train ticket, refreshments, and access to the closed press event.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
