Digimon collecting and training is obviously a big part of Cyber Sleuth, which has led to some calling it 'the Pokémon of PlayStation'. What do you think of that title?
To be honest, there is an immense difference in the contents and appeal between Digimon in comparison to Pokémon. I personally think that the concepts between Digimon and Pokémon are very different.
Pokémon is set in the fantasy world where the Pokémon's existence is normal. However, Digimon is based on a structure in which the various dramas are created by the encounters between the human beings of our reality and the Digimon from the unusual digital world.
While the Digimon's existence is abnormal and they are drawn as monsters, their common senses change through meetings between Digimon and humans, and then new relationships are created. I think this is the interesting, essential quality of Digimon.
We have focused on this point with the development of Cyber Sleuth.
Cyber Sleuth is coming to both PlayStation 4 and Vita, but it originally only launched on Vita in Japan. Is the PS4's huge success in the West the main reason as to why the game is being ported to the home console?
When Cyber Sleuth was developed, there was no plan to launch outside of Japan (in the US or Europe). But thanks to the overseas fans' enthusiasm and dedication to campaigning for a release, we can now release a Digimon game after so long. We are very thrilled.
The hardware market in Western territories drove us to decide on the PS4 addition overseas. We are very sorry that the launch is very much delayed compared to the Japanese version due to this.
If this title becomes a success, we can hopefully consider a worldwide, simultaneous launch for the next title.
Bandai Namco has been doing a lot of localisation work during this generation of consoles so far. Can we expect to see more Digimon games come West in the future, or will that depend on the success of Cyber Sleuth?
Yes, it will all depend on this title's success for the future.
However, we love to develop the Digimon games for Europe and we hope we continue to do this, so we really appreciate your support for Cyber Sleuth!