You may not know Japanese developer Yoshiro Kimura by name, but you likely do know of someone who does: Toby Fox, who credited Kimura's 1997 Moon: Remix RPG Adventure as an inspiration for Undertale. For as much obvious Earthbound DNA there is in the massively popular Undertale, there's also a critical bit of Moon in there, too. After working on some RPGs at Squaresoft early in his career, Kimura satirized the genre by having you go around healing monsters with kindness instead of killing them. Fox's love for Moon helped convince Kimura to get it translated and released on Steam and Switch after two decades.
Their friendship, I realized within a few minutes of talking with Kimura in Tokyo last month, also makes him careful to avoid piggybacking off of Undertale's popularity even if he'd have a good case for doing so.
"The most important thing for me when talking about Toby Fox in public is that I really like him, and because I really like him and respect him I don't want anyone to get the impression I'm trying to use his name," Kimura told me. "Undertale itself is a great game—playing it really moved me. It hit me in the soul, rather than the feels. As such, I can't say Undertale has absolutely no relation to Stray Children. There's some inspiration there, of course."
Stray Children is the first RPG Kimura has designed in more than 20 years, and his biggest project since the underappreciated 2009 Wii RTS Little King's Story. It's releasing on Steam in English at the end of October, and it's hard to play the first few hours without drawing a line straight to Undertale. Stray Children's battles put your young character up against a bizarre array of monstrous "Olders," who you can quickly kill with attacks or much more laboriously heal by whispering the correct sequence of encouraging words into their ear.
Thematically Stray Children very much feels like Moon, but the way it adds conversation options to a turn-based RPG menu is Undertale's puzzley pacifism "combat" through and through.
And I think that's delightful, because Stray Children's combat doesn't just reflect the shared interest Fox and Kimura have in games that buck convention. Its design mirrors the story of its creation, because Stray Children likely wouldn't exist at all without Fox's enthusiastic friendship.
"I had wanted to make another RPG post-Moon, and I'd been thinking about it for a long time," Kimura told me. "But making an RPG is not an easy undertaking. I've known lots of teams that have attempted it and failed in numerous ways. I didn't really have the courage to set off on that journey until I played Undertale, and that gave me that last push that I needed, while I'm still healthy enough to make that climb up the mountain, as it were.
"I think Toby and myself have one thing in common, which is that we both really like odd, weird, bizarre games. The reason I like them is they give me this warm feeling: 'Oh, it's okay for me to make games, too.' And of course I get ideas from them as well. So when Toby and I meet and chat, his eyes light up, and it's like he's expecting me to say or do something really interesting, and I get a kind of stimulus from that. Maybe he's seeing me in the same way, I don't know. What is this feeling? It's really bizarre, but it's almost like love. So when I'm making my games, Stray Children included, it's like a love letter to other people in the world out there who love these odd games, like Toby and I do."
I'll have more from my interview with Kimura, and a deeper look at Stray Children, in the near future.
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