By Dwaine Bullock A few months have passed since our we last checked in with former Enix of America product manager Justin Lucas. Now Justin has dropped by again to answer even more questions about 'ye olde Enix days. The Dwaine: Since you were a product manager, what was your approach to each title? Justin Lucas: The approach to each title is the same and yet different for every title - at the beginning you try to do as much research as you can - look at sales history for the genre, the series - if applicable, sales by developer and try to come up with an accurate idea of where your title is going to fall into that range, you look at your title and do a very impartial SWOT analysis 1. Strength - what does my title have that isn't already out on the market? Do I have a great developer that has a track record in the gaming community? Do all the other titles, or titles in the genre out only offer single player, where mine offers online, or multi-player? What is going to make my title stand out? 2. Weakness - pretty much the same questions as strength but in reverse what does my title not have that IS currently on the market - what is expected of a title in this genre that mine doesn't have. 3. Opportunities - What is available at your disposal to help the title in the way of marketing, cross marketing, etc. Is there not going to be any of this genre on the market for a few months? Am I going to have a good 2-3 month sell-in window all to myself in the genre? 4. Threats - What is the market going to look like when we launch? What is coming out that will challenge the titles ability to sell? Will there be a platform shift? From there I would do an advertising/review analysis of the genre and see how many pages of reviews did games in the genre get, avg. review score, how many pages of advertising did the publisher buy, or TV spots did they do? Over how many months and use that to figure out what effect that had on title sales. Where it gets different is the more business side related - break even points, price points vs. units sold, sell in as percent of install base, marketing dollars, retail visibility, etc. etc. etc. Was Dragon Warrior a hard sell to American audiences? How did its absence affect it? I don't think any great game is a hard sell per se. Final Fantasy VII did exceptionally well (albeit it was helped a great deal by Sony) and it didn't have a US release since FF III (FF VI Japan). Its absence wasn't as much of an effect as the pending hardware shift to the PlayStation 2 even with the backwards compatibility gamers were more interested in PS2 titles. After Nob, you became the administrator on Enix's forums. How important is a company's interaction and relationship with the fans? I don't think you can ever have too much interaction with the fans. Ever. It was an absolute pleasure (even with the trolling, and my occasional PWNing of said trolls) to interact with the fans. Especially fans who share the same passion as you do, and are as vocal about their support as the Enix board members were (are?). What was just as awesome was the whole office read the message board, and loved seeing what you, the fans had to say. There are very few companies that take the time to have a presence within their own communities. I hope the interaction meant as much to the board members as it did to us. I know it meant a lot to us. Many developers and other people in the industry (SquareEnix included) don't interact with the customers. Why do you think that is? I'm not sure, perhaps its passion? Maybe they think they don't have anything valuable to say? I am not sure I know or have a good enough answer for that. Everywhere I have worked I have always made it a point to interact as much as possible with the fans, because long before I got into this industry, that's what I was, and hey if by being accessible, being friendly, interacting sharing my passion for all things gaming it gets even one person interested in gaming as a career then I think that's pretty damn cool. But I don't think its fair to say that every single person on the boards is a customer. They are a potential customer, and it just may be your interaction with them the drives them to become a customer, it may be you talking about whatever game you are currently working on and showing your passion for a title or series that makes them think when they see your title on the shelf at retail. Or they may think, "Hey Justin from Enix really dug this title" I should give it a spin! I loved talking with the fans about any game, or genre and what my favorites were, challenging people who only play one specific game in a genre to expand their horizons at the very least - hey if you loved/hated <insert game here> at least tell me why, and back it up. If I liked a game, even Non-Enix games I would tell you guys, and attempt to back it up. In 2001, Revive had been cast on the Dragon Warrior franchise. What was it like working on fan favorite Dragon Warrior III and Dragon Warrior Monsters 2? Before my time at Enix, but I can tell you there wasn't a bigger collection of Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest fanboys in one office, then ours. Every new tidbit of info regarding anything with DW/DQ usually sent us running around the office like a bunch of schoolgirls. Enix contracted much of their localization staff. What's contracting like versus in-house and how would Enix go about finding translators? We had a great amazing outsourced translator as well as in house - we were incredibly lucky in that regard - depending on the size of the game text, etc. would dictate which route we went. There has been quite a bit on confusion over the years about Heartbeat. Who they were, what happened, etc. What was working with Heartbeat like? Heartbeat was the developer of the PlayStation release of Dragon Quest IV in Japan. They decided after DQ IV to take a sabbatical, and the rest as they say is history. We wanted to release DQ IV in the US. I mean REALLLLLLLY wanted to. We looked at every angle possible to do it, hiring different developers to work their code, and there just wasn't anyone who had the background and the ability to take that enormous amount of code, and game text and do it. Having to cancel the DW/Q IV was the hardest thing we as a group ever had to do, and having to announce it the fans was just as hard because it seemed once we announced it- fans thought we were lying to them about the reasons. Dragon Warrior VII had a gigantic script, but also had a very large number of typos, which people still point out to this day. Who were responsible for these mistakes and how did they get past you? First off to be fair considering the sheer amount of text in DW VII the ratio of typos isn't that bad, but I also think that any typo no matter where is one too many. I wish I had taken a picture of how much text was in that game- If I remember correctly it was something like 120 3 inch, 3 ring binders full of paper. That is an enormous amount of text. But that being said we learned a valuable lesson regarding that release in regards to making a better process for the copy editing process. I think it showed in every release from then on, just how committed we were to that end. It's still believed that Heartbeat's sabbatical was in protest over Yuji Horii's decision to choose Level-5 for DQ VIII. Any truth to that? Hahahaha - no, no truth to that at all - heck if I was Heartbeat I would have taken a sabbatical too! No matter which way Horii-san went with his decision. Heartbeat busted their butts for every title they worked on. Speaking as someone who took a sabbatical after roughly 10 years in the industry without a vacation - burnout does happen - even to those of those that do something we love doing. I don't know how much more needs to be explained about Heartbeat and DQ IV - I agree it sucks, but at this point I'm willing to bet there are more people who think we are hiding something, than people who believe us from the fan community. After this many years if there was a conspiracy don't you think it would have been leaked after the merger? Was it upsetting to hear Heartbeat tell you that they wanted a break and then seeing them practically jump right back in with some working on Pokémon Coliseum and seemingly reform as Arté Piazza for Dragon Quest V? To a degree, but at that point what can you really do? Even with Arté Piazza's lineage we still would have done everything in our power to release DQV in the US Enix of America never gave a specific reason for not bringing Dragon Quest Monsters 1+2 over. Was it due to sales of Dragon Warrior Monsters, a dying PSOne market, too soon for a remake or all of the above? More of an issue of the PSone market dying than anything. There just wasn't the retail shelf space to do it. Retail support wasn't there for ANY PSOne titles at that time - look at how hard a company with a track record like Working Designs had at the time with a collection like Arc the Lad. Here come the merger questions! What was your reaction when you learned about the merger? I won't forget that day. It was right before we all went home for Thanksgiving, I was working late with some of the staff on stuff for what was later released as Drakengard and for Star Ocean III. When we got a phone call from Japan, telling us what had just been announced and to check Yahoo! Japan to confirm - honestly we kind of thought it to be a prank - We were all shocked to say the least. Even though SquareEnix felt two localization offices weren't needed, do you think after all their hard work the Enix staff should've been offered a place in LA? Funny story - about a year and a half after the merger, as I was getting ready to move to Japan I get a phone call from a recruiter - who was asking me if I was interested in moving down to LA and working for a "major" video game publisher that focuses on RPG's, and if I would be interested - I obviously pieced together it was Square - and told the recruiter to look at my resume, and proceeded to chide and verbally abuse him for not looking at my resume, and not knowing anything about the industry, and why I didn't want the job. Should we all have been offered jobs, no I don't think so, many of the office staff had families and the decision to move would have been painful for them and their families- those of us that could have made the move very easy offered to do so, so that there was continuity in the projects, to offer any support, and help bring the Enix faithful into the fold, but that was quickly shot down. All of the staff has moved on to bigger and better things, so in the end it was maybe for the best. How has your opinion of the company changed since the merger because they don't seem to acknowledge Dragon Warrior's existence these days? I don't think my opinion has changed since the merger. Has the fan's opinion? Honestly I think many of the fans expressed dismay in the lack of an acknowledgment once the message boards went under Square control. I felt incredibly bad for the fans. I felt even worse because as the admin of the boards. I had nothing to tell you the fans about what was going on. Can you think of any reason why SquareEnix isn't giving us any other DQ games, past or future? Unfortunately – I cannot think of any but I am sure they have their reasons. You got to play DQ VIII about a year before its release. What is it like seeing a game in the early stages? Sometimes its great, and sometimes it's the most depressing thing in the world - with a game like DQVIII its great because even early on it is incredibly polished, and you can tell the vision , and the passion behind it is only going to get better with each new build - sometimes though you will see an early build and you think to your self - What the f.... is this? Sometimes you will see an early build of something from a developer that has no track record and everyone is looking at each other with that deer in the headlights look. Small anecdote - A company I used to work for was showing off a build of a game that was based on a major license for kids and the producer and the developer thought it was a good design choice to use a similar control scheme from a Flight Combat series of games - seriously they made a game that should have been targeted to 5 to 10 year old kids - insanely hard to control, I am all for making games challenging, but the control scheme chosen was just unforgiving, wasn't even close to being fair, and in turn it made the game not fun to play at all. What did you think of the changes made to Dragon Quest VIII? Were they needed? Do you think they helped sales? Purely my opinion, but I thought the game was really good, lots of fun, a very nice combination of old school DQ feel updated graphically. Were the changes made - needed? Did they help sales? That I cannot answer. What's your opinion on the voice acting and new interface? Given the differences between the markets would that have been something Enix would've considered? I know we would have done voice acting - the menu change... That's tough... Am I in the minority saying I liked it? Finally, how do you think SquareEnix has handled Dragon Quest/Warrior since the merger? Are they on the right track? Do they need to reevaluate their strategy? What would you have done differently? I think they have handled it fine, do they need to reevaluate? To be fair they have only released 1 DQ game so far (Editor Note: Now two games), and it sold fairly well. Would we have done anything differently - maybe, I'm not privy to their budget or any internal matters in regards to what they have in mind for the DQ brand… but it would be unfair of me to second guess, and play armchair quarterback with each and every DW/DQ title they release in the US. Once again, a big thanks goes out to Justin for taking time out to answer all these questions. I'd Like to give a great big thanks to you the fans who make it all possible - no game company is anything without you - the fans who make it all worth while! Dwaine you have my email if the fans want more Justin answers shoot them my way - hell it doesn't even have to be about Enix just gaming in general I am all for it.