By Dwaine Bullock In 2004, the former product manager and message board moderator of Enix America sat down to answer some questions about his time with the company The Dwaine: First up, tell everyone out there who you are and what you did at Enix of America. Justin Lucas: My name is Justin Lucas, and I was the Product Manager at EAI (Enix America Inc.) My responsibilities were making sure PR and marketing deliverables were accomplished on time, from screen shots you saw in magazines, artwork on web sites, the manual process, and helping our sales staff achieve max sell in. With such a small company as Enix , our office really busted our butts to make everything happen, I was also very fortunate to work with such a wonderful staff. Before we get to Enix, how did you get started in the industry and what are some other companies you've worked with? I got my start in the industry by working at Software Etc. (Yes, Software Etc. which later went on to become Gamestop). While working there I impressed the president of a local software publisher. Over the years I have worked for: Working Designs Sunsoft TDK Enix And I am currently the director of Marketing & PR at Agetec, a great independent publisher titles from Japan- My Current line-up includes Echo Night: Beyond, Armored Core: Nexus, Kuon, and Wild Arms Alter Code: F. When were you first introduced to the Dragon Quest series? Wow, probably with Dragon Warrior I or II honestly – it was so long ago and I remember after playing Zelda – I knew I wanted more games like it, hours of gameplay, gripping story, something more cerebral than the side-scrolling games, which I also loved but were never as much a challenge compared to an RPG. In late 1999, everyone was shocked at the announcement of Dragon Warrior Monsters. Who was responsible for choosing the title and reviving the series in America? I would imagine it was the President of Enix Paul Handelman, who knew how important it would be to Enix for the future to start rebuilding the DW brand. How did the Dragon Warrior series move away from EIDOS to the new Enix of America? Eidos only licensed the one title for Game Boy Color, as EAI was not yet set up fully. What is it like working for a Japanese company like Enix? Great, Amazing, Fun. Working with people who share your same passion, have a burning desire to succeed is very important. The US office was great fun, everyone in the office was very very close and we all still stay in contact. You've stated that the original Enix of America received much more support from the main Japanese office. How and why? I don’t think I ever said EAI of old received more support than we did, Enix’s Japanese offices were always very supportive of us on the marketing, production, and PR support side. Even though it was before your time, do you know why the original Enix of America closed its doors and ended development on Dragon Warrior V? Probably the same reason why many publishers closed up shop in those days- the bottom fell out of the SNES market, lots of companies closed up shop at that time. Many fans think that if a game is a hit in Japan, it will be a hit in the US. How does the American video game market differ from Japan's? Wow, how does it not differ would be a better question, - I remember a great post and I don’t recall who wrote it on the EAI message boards something along the lines of “If what is popular in Japan was popular in the US – we would be wallowing in train games and dating sims.” While that may be a slight exaggeration– Japanese gamers for the most part are more interested in games with sim elements, however over the years have become more influenced by western style games – GTA Vice City was just released in Japan recently and did incredibly well. Hopefully that means in the future games will become even more globally recognized and not seen as – a specific type or territory style game. Tell us about the process. What makes a title worthy of localization? The bottom line is the game fun; if the game is fun everything else falls into place. Though over the years there has been added emphasis on graphics over anything else, it seems. How is the game's text translated? What tools are used to implement the text into the game? The developer will take the games text and put it into excel so each persons individual text statements is in a cell. Those cells depending on how the text size is and font used you will have so many characters (letters, numbers, spaces) to use per line in Japanese, those files will be sent to a translator, then sent along to the localization manager who will spruce things up make sure the cells don’t go over the character count, clean it up, then give it back to the developer to implement into the game. From there the developer will input the text back into the game using whatever method, within the source code. How would you respond to reviews, particularly the negative ones that can have a less than tactful approach? Negative reviews I have never taken issue with, it’s reviews that are plain wrong, or are obviously written by someone who did not play the game that I take issue with. When that happens, I will usually call or e-mail the editor-in-chief, and respond to the review and bring up valid points, what was wrong or misstated in the review. Something to keep in mind a review is one person’s opinion of the game – if the reviewer doesn’t like a game and make a valid point and backs up his review then I have no problem with it – I am not going to act like some companies who expect every game to get a 9 or 10 or for reviewers to gloss over issues with the title. Why did Enix acquire GameArts? Why wouldn’t you? Grandia, Lunar, a host of other great titles over the years, an organization committed to quality RPG experiences, combined with Enix’s marketing prowess in Japan – the partnership was a slam dunk. There has been some controversy with Dragon Warrior VII's sales figures due to a Yahoo! Japan article and the charts on The Magic Box. If Enix of Japan/America does not publicly release their sales figures, where do these numbers come from? If you find the article on yahoo – it is credited to an unnamed source like a month or 2 after the US release and doesn’t factor in the upcoming holiday sales. What is funny though is the life this topic has taken on – hardly ever does a non-publicly traded company announce sales figures. Not once has any of the companies I have worked for publicly announced their sales figure’s. It seems like people want to pin the blame on some conspiracy of sales figures for DW VII leading to DW IV not coming to the US. Which could not be any FURTHER from the truth. Do you feel that the revival of Dragon Warrior has been successful? Is there a title you wish had done better? I think DQ VIII, when it releases here in the US, will be the answer to that, I think Enix did a wonderful job of building the franchise for the future by pushing the game to a younger demographic first and working the series towards the future. But a lot depends on how Square Enix handles the property in the US. For a title that I wish had done better? Hmmm probably the last title released by Enix- Robot Alchemic Drive. It was really great to see the editors really take to the game, and support it. The title got a lot of exposure, and sold well, it just got lost in the release of other titles at that holiday time period. You knew this question was coming. Dragon Warrior IV. For those who still don't know, what happened, development-wise? If you don’t know the story you must be living under a rock! Hahahah! I think from the time we announced the cancellation to the time of the merger the message board was FULL of posts calling us liars. If we wanted to lie, I am sure we could have come up with something much more creative than Heartbeat closing up shop wanting to move on. Ask any programmer of any programming language how interested they are in working on someone else’s code. That will give you an idea of what we went through to find a way for us to bring the title to the US. Please explain to everyone why hiring new programmers wouldn't work. As I mentioned working on someone else’s code – no matter what language is difficult, add in the fact that DW IV was IMMENSE- Nobody wanted to touch it, it was just too daunting a task – There would be nobody to ask how certain event scripts are handled – how anything is done within the code, Every programmer does tasks differently, and having anyone have to learn what does what on the fly would be daunting to say the least. Thanks goes out to Justin who took time out of working on Wild Arms Alter Code: F to answer these questions. The rest of the interview will be posted whenever he gets around to answering the rest of them. Until then, head down to your local store and purchase a copy of Agetec's Wild Arms Alter Code: F for your Playstation 2.