Today, Japanese role-playing video games are usually associated either with "JRPGs", exemplified by the likes of Final Fantasy, or with niche Wizardry-inspired dungeon crawlers. The first Dragon Quest game may have been famously conceived as a cross between Wizardry and Ultima, but since then JRPGs have evolved in a different, distinct direction. As a
US Gamer article puts it, "when Phantasy Star II and Final Fantasy IV came along to introduce manga and theatre influences to the format, Japanese RPGs never (well,
rarely, anyway) looked back."
There was a time, however, when it seemed that some of the other, more "advanced" kinds of Western computer RPGs might also take root in Japan. The Japanese company that ported the early Ultima games to Japanese computers, StarCraft Inc., also localized other important WRPGs — from Might and Magic to Phantasie to The Magic Candle — which even sold fairly well in the Land of the Rising Sun. Naturally, these games, too, incorporated early Ultima and Wizardry influences, but they built on these influences to create a distinctly "Western" RPG blend, more open and less story-driven than the typical JRPG. In the West, it is this blend that eventually led to games like Ultima VII, Fallout or Arcanum; in Japan, it didn't really catch on, despite StarCraft's best efforts.
In this interview, we talk to Toshio Sato, who worked with StarCraft and programmed many of their important titles. In a way, this is a continuation of our
interview with Winston Douglas Wood, the Phantasie creator, since Mr. Sato was part of the team that made the Japanese-only
Phantasie IV (which Doug Wood designed himself). Aside from that, Mr. Sato worked on New World Computing's
Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan, the only Western RPG to be coded in Japan first and then ported to the West, as well as on many of StarCraft's localizations. There isn't much information in English on StarCraft's history, so we also talk about that in the interview, as well as about the difficulties they had in porting English-language CRPGs to Japanese computer systems.
