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Anime Expo 2025: CyberConnect2 Talks With Anime Herald
🕑 Added 2025-08-25 18:33:12 +0000 UTCNote: Due to time constraints, this will be published on Anime Herald's main site on August 27, 2025. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Author: Seth Burn
Editor: Samantha Ferreira
Anime Herald: Where would you like to start?
Taichiro Miyazaki: Fuga: Melodies of Steel 3 just came out recently, concluding the Fuga: Melodies of Steel series. We would like to give thanks to all of the fans that made it possible for us to release three games and conclude the series successfully.
We’d like to give a special shout out to our American fans. Fuga has seen the most sales in the US. Thank you to everyone who might be from the US for supporting our game.
Anime Herald: We’ll come back to Fuga. What else are you currently working on?
Taichiro Miyazaki: There are a few projects that have been announced that we’re allowed to talk about. First, there is Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot DLC "DAIMA: Adventure Through the Demon Realm" coming out July 16.
We also have Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Hinokami Chronicles 2 coming out in August this year. Those are the only things we’ve announced on the development side.
On the publishing side, we’ve announced Tokyo Ogre Gate and Cecile. Cecile is steadily coming along. We hope to be able to deliver more details next year.
Anime Herald: How involved are you personally with individual game mechanics?
Taichiro Miyazaki: On the development side, I work with our clients on the contracts. On development, I do budgeting, scheduling, and assignment of personnel. I work with the companies we outsource work to, and take care of the operations side. Our CEO, Mr. Hiroshi Matsuyama, is in charge of individual game quality.
Anime Herald: Were you involved in the contracts for the upcoming Dragon Ball Z and Demon Slayer titles?
Taichiro Miyazaki: Absolutely.
Anime Herald: What’s it like? Do they come to you, or does Cyberconnect2 reach out to them?
Taichiro Miyazaki: For all of our games, including our licensed titles, we generally propose the games ourselves. We decide on the content and the direction of the game. What we want to play within the company. Then, usually our CEO Mr. Matsuyama and some of the developers will get together. They’ll have some meetings about the budget, the schedule, and the content of the game. They’ll draft a proposal, and then we take that to the publishers and say “We have an idea for this game. Will you let us make it?
Anime Herald: Were you personally in the meetings where you pitched the games for Dragon Ball Z and Demon Slayer?
Taichiro Miyazaki: Of course.
Anime Herald: What were those meetings like? What is it like to pitch a game to another company?
Taichiro Miyazaki: It’s not a single meeting that determines these things. It’s something that’s built up over a long period of time. We have contracts with both Bandai Namco and Aniplex. At the beginning, we’ll talk about it very casually “Hey, we’re thinking about this for the next project. Can we talk about this more specifically down the line?”
Since both DAIMA and The Hinokami Chronicles 2 are both sequels, we already had weekly meetings with our clients that I always attend. As one project heads towards conclusion, we’ll start discussing our ideas for what we can do next and ask if the client would be interested in our vision. This is the scaffolding that is built around the new game proposal before we go in with the specifics.
Anime Herald: Your background is in sales. You understand that you can have all the meetings you want, but there’s one meeting where you close. That’s the big meeting.
Taichiro Miyazaki: I understand what you’re saying. The meeting where you sign the contract is important. But, it’s not as important as all the meetings leading up to it, where we discuss how the game can meet expectations and satisfy the audience. We’ll have multiple meetings leading up to the signing of the contract discussing the terms of the contract and the content of the game. Once we are all on the same page, the signing of the contract is the expected conclusion.
Anime Herald: You might not realize this, but this is an enormous cultural difference between America and Japan. In America, particularly here in Los Angeles, where the movie business is, you can have so many meetings, and feel like you’re 99% of the way there, and you’re not. Until you actually have that final meeting and sign the contract, you have no idea how close you are to a deal or not.
Taichiro Miyazaki: We’ve had that happen in Japan as you describe. Perhaps a little less often than you have in the United States, that could be a cultural difference. That said, thankfully for Cyberconnect2, usually when we have these meetings, the client wants us to make these games, because we have already built up a good relationship with them. They know they can trust us with their IPs and deliver a good quality product. If anything, they are looking to us and saying, “We would really like you to make the next game in this series.”
Thankfully for us, it is rare to have all of those meetings and not be able to sign a contract at the end.
For someone like Bandai Namco in particular, we’ve been doing work with them for thirty years. All of our meetings with them are very positive-minded. They’ll give us data that we don’t have, about how the North American and European markets look. They’ll give us feedback on what parts of our proposals they’d like changed, and what parts of the games they’d like to see enhanced. They’ll help us tailor the game so that we can get to a signed contract.
Having said that, we don’t actually begin work on a game until we have a signed contract. We’ll have lots of discussions and negotiations, but development doesn’t begin until we’ve signed.
Anime Herald: Obviously you can’t discuss anything that hasn’t been publicly released, but have you signed any of these contracts of the past three months that we’ll be seeing in a few years?
Taichiro Miyazaki: The way contracts work for us, because game development now takes so much time and money, it’s not just one contract, but a series of contracts. There will be a contract for the technical investigation, a contract for the pre-production. Usually, when we’re nearing the end of one stage, we’ll sign a contract for the next one.
Anime Herald: How many contracts are we talking about here?
Taichiro Miyazaki: It will depend on the client and the project, and will differ from title to title. Usually we’ll look down the line at how many years the project will take, and how many billions of yen it will cost.
We start with the broad brush strokes. But game development is a series of inventions. There will be things we’ll want to look into, such as potential new visuals, or new elements we’d like to incorporate. That’s part of the technical investigation phase. What can we do with the current technology? What can we do looking into the future? Can we even make the game that we have in our heads? That’s the technical investigation contract.
After that is the pre-production contract. After that, it really depends, but usually it will be three or four more phases. We’ll discuss if the time frame will still work, if the budget is still accurate. We’ll discuss the vision from the original contract and see if we want to modify it, and sign contracts as necessary.
Anime Herald: That was a very good line “Game development is a series of inventions.”
Taichiro Miyazaki: Thank you.
Anime Herald: Now let’s go back to Fuga: Melodies of Steel. Were you with Cyberconnect2 when they made the first game?
Taichiro Miyazaki: Yes, I was.
Anime Herald: Do you remember the initial discussions of the Soul Cannon?
Taichiro Miyazaki: Yes, I do.
Anime Herald: What was the initial reaction when people discovered that one of the game mechanics allowed you to put a four-year old girl into a room and sacrifice her life and soul to win a battle?
Taichiro Miyazaki: I definitely remember that conversation. I remember the reactions in the room. I remember that the biggest question in the room was, “Will we even be able to sell this game globally?”
Anime Herald: Looking beyond the sales for a second, did anyone say, “Maybe we should not do this?”
Taichiro Miyazaki: No. In that meeting, no one said we shouldn’t do that, because sacrificing the child is not the point of the game. The point of the game is to strategize to avoid having to sacrifice a child in the story. We focused on what kind of gameplay elements we could put in so players could strategize to avoid that tragic fate, so no one was suggesting it was a bad idea.
Anime Herald: Are you familiar with the story of Prometheus?
Taichiro Miyazaki: Vaguely.
Anime Herald: Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. For his punishment, he was chained to a rock. An eagle would eat out his liver everyday, and it would grow back every night.
Fuga: Melodies of Steel has a time reversal mechanic. If someone chose to, they could sacrifice a child, go back in time, and then do it again. They could make that their version of the gameplay.
Taichiro Miyazaki: Obviously, different people are going to play the game differently. Some people will choose the pacifist route and play to not sacrifice anyone. Some people might choose to sacrifice everyone and then return to the beginning and try the pacifist route. Some people might do as you said, repeatedly sacrificing a child. I think the mechanism gives players a wide variety of choices in how they play the game.
Anime Herald: …
That’s true. I will tell you that if you were an American company, and someone were to propose this mechanic, people would say “Boss, respectfully, put ‘em up, we’re fighting.”
Taichiro Miyazaki: When we are making a game, we’ll focus on what will make this game appealing and enthralling. You can put out a game that’s kind of safe and bland. Something sanitized. For us, we want to deliver something to the audience that will make them feel something. For Fuga, one of the main themes was player choice. The choices they make would affect various areas of the story. One of those choices is the sacrifices they make to the soul cannon.
Taichiro Miyazaki: That said, one of the discussions that did come up was “how do we express that sacrifice?” The child is no longer there. That’s a sensitive area. How we display that on screen will matter to a lot of people?
Anime Herald: Switching gears, I know for the thirtieth anniversary you changed your business cards. Were there any other company changes for the thirtieth anniversary?
Taichiro Miyazaki: One of the things we’ve been looking at as a company, thanks to the Fuga series, is how we can better publish games ourselves. What kind of structures do we need to better improve as a publisher?
That said, we don’t plan on switching to become a publisher. We want to keep the ratio between our development projects and our publishing projects about the same going forward. Discussing the two titles that were announced at the same time as Fuga, Cecile and Tokyo Ogre Gate, Tokyo Ogre Gate has gone back to the drawing board. It’s being redeveloped from the proposal stage. We’ve been working on Cecile and hope to be able to deliver some news on that next year.
Anime Herald: For Tokyo Ogre Gate, it is as you say. Game development is a series of inventions.
Taichiro Miyazaki: Absolutely. It needs more inventions. We felt that Tokyo Ogre Gate didn’t have that Cyberconnect2 uniqueness. Something that felt like only Cyberconnect2 could make.
(Editor’s note: Given the Soul Cannon, I am not sure how one should feel about uniqueness.)
Taichiro Miyazaki: For Cecile, and the project developed, we’ve been able to concretely describe what makes it Cyberconnect2, so it is headed in a good direction.
Anime Herald: Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Taichiro Miyazaki: For all of our games, across the board, our biggest audience is in North America. We feel the North American audience has evolved over time. Our games historically have had an anime/manga feel to them. One of our biggest questions is “Are our games meeting the audience’s expectations?”
We do a lot of searching online to see what people are saying about our games. We value customer feedback.
Anime Herald: Thank you very much.
Taichiro Miyazaki: Thank you.
