Interview with a Former Fuuki Developer about their Work on Zero One SP and Other Titles

Last year I made a video talking about Zero One SP on the Gameboy Advance, a cult-classic Japanese adventure game made by a former arcade developer called Fuuki. Recently a member of the game’s development team reached out to me and shared a few stories about the title’s creation. The person wishes to remain anonymous but I was given permission to share a summary of the stories they told me. I spoke with the person over text chat and all of the responses I received were written in English. But keep in mind that these responses were most likely translated from Japanese using automated tools. Therefore, there could be some errors but I did have the dev review this blog post before publishing it.

Anyway, without further or due, here is the information that was shared with me.

The dev I spoke with joined Fuuki around the time Asura Buster was in development. A friend had invited them to work at the arcade developer after they had had a bad experience working at their previous job. Fuuki was a studio that, on paper, didn’t have much to offer. Many of the experienced developers that had worked on Asura Buster had recently left the company and only a small handful of inexperienced staff members remained.

“Asura Buster was a game that was made by about 10 people, but it took too long to complete, and the director took responsibility for it by transferring departments, many staff members left, and 3 new artists worked on debugging and adjusting difficulty during the day. A programmer working at another company came to work at night to do the work.”

It was a shoestring crew who didn’t have a lot of resources to work with. But, despite all this, the dev described Fuuki’s president, as well as the employees in other departments, as nice people and said that the developers were all passionate about their work.

Fuuki’s transition into handheld development began because of the company’s game center business. Fuuki operated various arcades in the Kansai region of Japan and if the president personally enjoyed a game he would order a lot of units, which helped the company develop a positive relationship with many game publishers. This eventually led to a salesman from Bandai suggesting that Fuuki make games for the company’s WonderSwan handheld, since games on the platform were easier to make and could be very profitable. The president of Fuuki was sold on the idea and a proposal was soon drafted for a game called Youkaidou, an RPG with puzzle-based battles. However, Bandai ended up turning Fuuki down and did not allow them to develop for the WonderSwan, explaining that they wanted more titles based on existing IP rather than something original.

“Bandai did not allow us to participate in WonderSwan, saying, ‘We don't need an original game. We want the manga to be serialized in a magazine or the anime to be shown on TV.’”

With no other choice, Fuuki decided to repurpose their game idea for the Gameboy Advance, which was going to launch in the near future, and had no trouble getting permission from Nintendo as long as they could pay the licensing fee.

The president of Fuuki offered a lot of freedom for the staff to make the games they wanted within reason. However, Youkaidou still only had a small budget to work with. Because of this, the title couldn’t have the visual flair of other RPGs on the platform like Golden Sun, so the team mainly focused on polishing Youkaidou’s battle system. However, visuals were still important so the team decided to present the story like a novel game to make the presentation more appealing without needing a lot of extra manpower. Some of Youkaidou’s staff had previously worked at Metro Corporation on an adventure game for the Sega Saturn called Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo: Hoshimitou Kanashimi no Hukushuuki, so the team simply reused the system they had developed for Kindaichi to create Youkaidou’s story segments.

Sadly, Youkaidou sold very poorly upon its release. Fuuki received assistance from Konami to distribute the title and the game had been given some light advertising but it failed to find an audience. This failure was pretty devastating to the dev I interviewed and they began thinking that they didn’t have what it takes to create video games in the modern industry.

“This failure made me think that I shouldn't be a game creator in this day and age.”

However, the dev decided to work on at least one more project at Fuuki, which ended up becoming Zero One.

The team realized while making Youkaidou that customers were looking to play games that had flashy animated graphics and, around the same time, Ace Attorney had become quite popular on the GBA. Since the team already had the tech to make novel-style story segments, Fuuki decided to capitalize on the popularity of Ace Attorney and make their own adventure game with plenty of animated scenes.

“We can easily create novel games because we can reuse Kindaichi's system. We also realized that the market was looking for something with an animated screen like the Golden Sun. So I thought I'd make one. I intended this to be my last piece.”

However, this time around, the team decided to make something that was a bit more off the wall compared to Youkaidou. Zero One is a game full of zany plot twists and set pieces that are so outlandish that they are almost laughable, and this was very much by design. From the beginning, Zero One was intended to be like a quirky B-movie. In fact, the team even researched famous kusoge titles and tried to emulate the enduring qualities some of those games have.

“At that time, there was a popular game-related book called ‘Super Bad Games’*, which introduced various poorly made games. I used the fact that these games are still talked about even though they are not hit products as a reference. In other words, I wanted to create an atmosphere that felt like someone had tried to make a normal game and failed. It's a serious story, but it's ridiculous.”

*I believe the book being referenced is “Chou Kusoge”.

The story itself was a mishmash of various sci-fi plots. This was also very much done on purpose. The game’s premise was first conceived by Zero One’s scenario writer back when they were a university student and was influenced by a manga called PINK by Kyoko Okazaki. In the manga, a character creates a novel by pasting together pieces of different books and Zero One looked to do something similar, deconstructing various inspirations and connecting them all into an original story. Specifically, Zero One borrowed a lot of ideas from the works of Shotaro Ishinomori.

“Cyborg 009 fights against the creator. Agartha is where the creator tries to remake humanity. The story about the android and his sister is Kikaider. Inazuman is a story in which the main character transforms with supernatural powers. The main character has two friends in The Phantom Alliance. Genma Taisen is where a foreigner comes to recruit the main character. The main character's team name is ‘Eagle’* from Goranger.”

*The team in Zero One is called “E-gro” but it is spelt as “イーグル” in katakana, which is the same spelling as “Eagle”.

In terms of its visuals, the team had hoped to invite the character designer of Asura Buster to work on Zero One. Sadly, they had since left the company and were not interested in returning to contribute to the game. So instead the art was created by the dev’s old friend from elementary school, which may be why Zero One’s art has an unconventional look to it.

The dev I interviewed compared Zero One’s reception to egg-cooked rice, a dish where a raw egg is mixed into a bowl of cooked rice. Some people love the dish while others will never touch the stuff. Many people never played Zero One but it did gain a dedicated cult following who praised the title. However, sales were still very low since Zero One’s target audience was also very knowledgeable about emulators and many people simply pirated the game. This was actually a common issue with other GBA games at the time, according to the dev, with even titles like Ace Attorney only selling a relatively small number of copies despite its popularity.

But again, despite its sales, Zero One had gained the love of a small following, and that also included people within Fuuki itself. Many of the young staff that had joined the company after the release of Youkaidou adored Zero One and were eager to revisit the title. Thus the idea was born to create an enhanced edition of the game called Zero One SP.

When the team set out to create Zero One SP they had three goals they wanted to achieve.

The first was to make the title enjoyable for new players but also returning fans as well. Therefore, SP included all the content of the original game along with tons of new stories, almost doubling the size of the game. Additionally, the story’s tone was also slightly altered. While Zero One was designed to be a straight-faced parody, fans loved the story for what it was and didn’t think of it as a parody at all. For this reason, the team decided to cut back on the parody elements in SP and wrote the story to be a bit more serious.

“The difference in the art between these two works is talked about, but the biggest difference is that although they share the same story, Zero One is more playful, while Zero One SP is told more seriously.”

The second goal was to update the game’s character designs. Early in development, Fuuki got in contact with Kadokawa to get assistance advertising Zero One SP in their magazines as well as getting in contact with a new character designer. Kadokawa agreed to help and used its many connections in the world of anime and manga to introduce Fuuki to several artists. Many of the artists were people that had been very active in years past but were currently available to work on a project like Zero one SP. One of the artists was Yutaka Izubuchi, which the dev I spoke with liked, but the younger staff at the company thought that Takehiko Ito was a better fit for the project. And so, Ito created drafts for 15 characters in a short period of time and also illustrated the game’s cover art. While the dev never met the artist in person, they stated that Ito immediately understood that the team wanted designs inspired by the stories of Ishinomori.

“[Ito] immediately understood and said, ‘It's Kikaider’.”

The third and final goal for SP was a bit more specific. Back in the day, Weekly Famitsu was a huge force in the industry and it was very important to get coverage in the magazine. Sadly, Famitsu had written some not so favorable articles about Fuuki’s games in the past and the company had a somewhat rocky relationship with the publication. During the development of the original Zero One, there was a specific incident where, due to a misunderstanding, Fuuki had to rush a copy of the game to Famitsu at the last minute for them to review. Only two days later, Famitsu sent Fuuki a manuscript for their review and the scores were pretty low despite Zero One receiving high marks from Nintendo’s QA team and other magazines. Based on screenshots in the review, the dev I spoke with assumed that Famitsu’s reviewers had only played the beginning of Zero One. According to the dev, the game only really started to become interesting in chapter 6 so this meant that they never saw Zero One at its best. This may have been an unfair review but the experience made the team realize that they needed to restructure Zero One’s story for SP. The game would now begin with a relatively short scenario that properly showcased the game’s appeal and saved the longer story routes for later, when the player was already fully invested in the game.

“I had to play until about chapter 6 of Zero One before I realized how interesting it was. Based on this reflection, I made it so that in Zero One SP, you can only play long stories after you have played a short story.”

All this extra work was well received by fans but Zero One SP still shared the same fate as Fuuki’s other GBA titles and failed to sell many units. Afterwards, the dev I spoke with left Fuuki about 6 months after Zero One SP’s launch. The dev mentioned that Fuuki experimented with developing games for the Chinese market and they eventually started making arcade slot machines but, outside of those details, they don’t know much else about what happened to the company after their departure.

“I stayed at Fuuki for about half a year after Zero One SP. At that time, my team was just starting to create slot games for the first time. However, it was not a gambling machine, but an imitation of an arcade slot machine. However, I quit Fuuki midway through that project. So I don't know much about what happened after that.”

Today, the dev I spoke with currently works in an industry outside of games but they still seem to look back on their work at Fuuki fondly.