Nanashi No Game Was Considered For North America, Focus Groups Killed It

Before Takashi Tokita created the jovial world in Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light, he worked on a Nintendo DS horror game called Nanashi no Game (Nameless Game). Perhaps inspired a bit by the Japanese horror film The Ring, the story centers around a cursed RPG you were foolish enough to play.

"At GDC 2006, I saw a presentation on a horror FPS game. When I saw this I thought the first person format was a great fit for horror," Tokita said as he reminisced about the creation of Nanashi no Game. "I wanted to do it on the DS because even though it was small we could deliver something high quality and also very scary. If I didn’t come to GDC, the idea would have never come to pass."

With only days left to live, you have to solve the mystery in the real world and the eerie 8-bit RPG. Similar to a point and click adventure game, actions, like inspecting an object in the real world, may open a path in the video game world. Since Asian horror movies (well, at least remakes) are popular in North America, I asked Tokita if he considered releasing Nanashi no Game overseas.

"We talked to a focus group and they thought it wasn’t good for the market, so we didn’t do it," Tokita replied. "Maybe as a downloadable title it’s possible." I was surprised since Japanese and Korean horror movies were on the rise, so I asked Tokita to elaborate. "The opinion was you couldn’t shoot anything. Maybe we shouldn’t have been too concerned about it."

Outside of the NES style RPG, players walked around in first person mode with the Nintendo DS held like a book. I suppose that made Nanashi no Game seem like a FPS even though it was really an adventure game.