Spotlight: Vanillaware Beginnings
Hello! It’s March now, and applications will be opening next month! So we thought we’d put together a few posts highlighting the different games from Vanillaware, as wells its beginnings seeing as that’s what the zine is all about.
The story of early Vanillaware is in many ways the story of the company’s president and founder, George Kamitani. Kamitani got his start at Atlus with a game called Princess Crown— initially pitched as something similar to Gainax’s Princess Maker 2, Crown shifted to more of an action RPG over the course of development. While Vanillaware only has a couple of the same people from this earlier title, Princess Crown is important for how many conventions it pioneered and established in the broader Vanillaware canon. Obvious things like the staple, 2D-sidescrolling action nature of the game would be revisited in almost every game moving forward, as well as the bright colors and unique fantasy designs— but even more unique or specific things such as characters, enemies, and concepts would return in later games as well. For example, multi-character story with interweaving plotlines would return in Odin Sphere, Oboro Muramasa, as well as the more popular 13 Sentinels; and specifically certain characters such as Hindel the dragon & various enemies would return from Princess Crown in Odin Sphere.
While Princess Crown didn’t do well commercially, it became a critical and cult hit, leading to Kamitani’s next project with Enix (before its merger with Square): Fantasy Earth Zero, at that time subtitled Ring of Dominion. More things were solidified in this development, such as developing a working relationship with Hitoshi Sakimoto, the head composer on nearly every Vanillaware game, some key members like Shigatake and Kentaro Ohnishi joining at this time, and the forming of the company itself: a 10-person collective initially called Puraguru. Kamitani also was responsible for the game’s more traditional fantasy direction, as well as the story of the game evolving through competitive online play between factions— another idea revisited again in the later title Grand Knight’s History. Unfortunately, Kamitani and Enix split on bad terms when the Square-Enix merger placed Fantasy Earth Zero under Multiterm’s control.
While Kamitani considers this the most stressful development he’s ever had in the industry, it luckily wouldn’t deter him from continuing to make games. In 2004 the company moved to the Kansai area and renamed from Puraguru to Vanillaware, hoping to make games with as enduring a taste as the ever popular vanilla ice cream.
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