Gaijinworks Working On Visual Novels?

I ran into Vic Ireland, previously President of Working Designs and now President Gaijinworks, who revealed a scrapped Guitar Freaks localization to Siliconera. Before that topic came up I asked Ireland about his new company, Gaijinworks.

“We’re consulting for things like Miami Law, consulting localization, actually Miami Law started as straight consulting and then turned into localization,” Ireland answered. “We’ll do that and we’ll do developing, localization, customizing for another publisher, and we also plan on publishing our own stuff too. We’re covering all the bases and not just doing one thing. Basically, we’re branching out from what we did at Working Designs and opening it up a little more.”

Ireland said they were working on three titles. At first I thought these were RPGs. Working Designs previously focused on bringing Japanese RPGs to North America, but Irelands eyes lit up when I mentioned visual novels. He called the genre “the last frontier”, said “imagine Working Designs style visual novels,” and smiled. Miami Law, Ireland’s first post Working Designs project, is a hybrid game meets visual novel. Perhaps, Ireland is thinking about localizing games like The Last Bullet, which like Miami Law has shooting scenes and lots of text.