THINK OF THE KIDS

How Undertale gave Yoshiro Kimura the courage to make STRAY CHILDREN

- Wes Fenlon

Yoshiro Kimura seems to only be half kidding when he tells me that he “escaped” from Squaresoft in the mid-1990s, where he’d started his career as a game designer on Romancing SaGa 2 for the SNES. Even then, he wanted to work with a smaller team, where his own ideas could shine through.

“Making games, money aside, it’s fun, and it needs to be fun to make something fun,” he told me over coffee in Tokyo in late September. “With a smaller group of people, you’ve got all the essential elements to make a game, and they’ve all got their own special abilities. One is great at art, another is great at programming. And to share the vision, it’s a lot less work.”

With his John Lennon glasses and a tweed newsboy cap corralling graying sideburns, Kimura is the Platonic ideal of an elder statesman indie dev. His games from the early 2000s, including survival horror Rule of Rose and kissing-based life-sim Chulip, have the sort of cult appeal that inspires retrospective YouTube essays and Let’s Plays. But his new game Stray Children returns to a genre he hasn’t really touched since 1997.

The same year Square achieved stratospheric success with Final Fantasy VII, Kimura and other ex-Square devs at what we’d now call an indie studio released Moon: Remix RPG, a meta commentary on RPGs where you’re asked, “Why is it OK that this hero is killing thousands of innocent monsters?” It was not quite a hit on Final Fantasy VII’s level. The studio disbanded three years later, and Moon wouldn’t be released in English until a remaster in 2021. That remaster—and now