Oninaki devs talk about the game's goals, focus on dark story, and more

Oninaki is exactly one week away from launching for Switch, and the dev team behind the project is eager to tell people why they should be excited. In an interview with Dengeki Online, Oninaki‘s Creative Producer Takashi Tokita, Producer Ryutaro Sasaki, and Director Atsushi Hashimoto shared all sorts of insight into the game itself, as well as the development process. Check out a summary of info below.

- the team decided to launch a demo to make players realize Oninaki isn’t a “high-speed action game”, but an “action RPG”
- Oninaki is similar to Final Fantasy V in how you can have fun and choose which jobs to level
- you’ll be able to clear Oninaki even if you don’t level and use all your jobs, just use the ones you like the most
- Oninaki was balanced so that you can clear the game even if you stick to a single job your whole playthrough
- Oninaki is different from Final Fantasy III, which is reputed to have very difficult boss fights depending on which jobs you use
- Oninaki doesn't have any boss fights like that of Hein in Final Fantasy III
- Hashimoto mentioned that while he likes writing dark stories, Tokita pushed the staff into making Oninaki‘s story dark
- Oninaki‘s scenarist Hirotaka Inaba was initially holding back, but he went all out after a while
- the team couldn’t make Oninaki‘s story too dark either, as that would make the game’s rating too high, losing potential players
- the devs ended up self-censoring things to make the game get a rating of Cero B/12 and older
- Tokita said old games didn’t have the technology to be more expressive, so nearly everything was told through story and text
- games needed stories strong enough to fight by themselves, hence why a single good story could make or break a game
- this created an environment when devs would focus on story, and write stories that couldn’t be portrayed in anime or movies
- Tokita added how he believes we’re in an era where ethics and regulations for content are becoming harsher
- Tokita decided to make a story that tries to push the limits and does as much as it can
- he wanted to show just how far you can go with an RPG
- Tokita believes that he achieved that with Oninaki, and that it’s the biggest point showing his involvement with the game