Feature: Child's Play: From Bokunatsu To Natsu-Mon - The Kaz Ayabe Interview

Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale

[Interviewer's note: The following section assumes readers have either played or are familiar with Attack of the Friday Monsters, Ayabe and Level-5’s downloadable game for 3DS which formed part of the Guild 02 anthology of games. Thus this section contains spoilers, but really, it’s an 11-year-old game at the time of writing. What are you even doing?]

NL: What did you do between Bokunatsu and Attack of the Friday Monsters and Shin-chan? Between Bokunatsu and Attack of the Friday Monsters was a four-year gap. Between Attack of the Friday Monsters and Shin-chan was an eight-year gap. Did you take breaks or were you secretly working on other stuff behind the scenes? You're much more prolific again. Did the breaks give you ideas?

KA: Bokunatsu Portable 2 development ended around 2010. Attack of the Friday Monsters development ended in 2013. I was building Attack of the Friday Monsters between those years and I was also working on game ideas for the new Sony hardware. I was making prototypes and submitting project ideas. I think that's how I was spending my time. Also, it’s a lot of work making games so I was tired and recuperating.

After Attack of the Friday Monsters, and before I started working on the first Shin-chan I was working on our restaurant, Kasei Curry. Also, I was working on proposals for [a company called] Forwardworks on mobile game ideas.

During that time, it was hard for me to make games, so I wasn't able to make any. To sum up, it's not that I wasn't able to make games, but I just wasn’t as prolific as I was in the past.

NL: Attack of the Friday Monsters is a good title. It reminds me of the Friday Roadshows [Interviewer's note: A regular TV program in Japan that highlights a new movie every Friday night].

KA: When I was in kindergarten, Ultraman Returns, the Ultraman series, started airing on TV in April. It aired every Friday. That's how I came up with the idea for Attack of the Friday Monsters. And Bokunatsu, because it's a summer vacation, it spans one month. Along the same line, for this game the monsters appear on Friday, so initially the game was written to span one day. But actually it ended up ending on a Saturday in-game, so technically the game spans two days.

NL: Is the post-game primarily just an additional opportunity to complete your deck and ultimately beat S-chan? She's got the strongest deck. You basically have to beat all your friends at the card battle repeatedly to complete your deck, and then level all the cards up to maximum rank in order to have a chance to beat her. Is this primarily purpose of the post-game?

KA: I don't remember the details, but to tell you a little bit of the behind-the-scenes story, I was initially planning to end it on Friday, right? The player would beat the monster on Friday and that would be it. But Level-5 said I needed to add more to the game ending so we added S-chan at the end. The game’s difficulty is a little off. I was a little more lenient with the overseas version so it's not like that, but the Japanese version is very hard to beat. I regretted it a little. And I was a little more gentle with the English version, which came out a few months later.

NL: The English version isn’t easy either, so the Japanese version must be pretty tough. If you lose once, it resets your progress and you have to win twice in a row to start earning glims again [Interviewer's note: Glims are basically EXP points for your card deck]. It's pretty difficult to keep a win streak going.

KA: I'm sorry, I don't remember. [laughs] Is that the case?

NL: The Guild 01 is the first compilation of games published by Level-5, which came out physically for Nintendo 3DS in Japan only. All the games were also released individually on the eShop. But Attack of the Friday Monsters is part of Guild 02, the second compilation, which never got a physical release. It was digital-only and now the Nintendo eShop for 3DS is shut down, so you can’t buy it anymore. If anything ever happens to our 3DSes, the game may be lost forever.

My question is, I know it was designed for dual screens, but there's always ways to design around that. The bottom screen is basically just a map. That could be moved to a pop-up screen, or it could exist side-by-side on a widescreen handheld like the Switch.

Is there any chance — or has Level-5 ever mentioned it to you — that this game could be reborn on Switch or PC or any other portable like Steam Deck? Because it's a shame that this game can't be obtained anymore.

KA: It's the same in Japan, too. There's no physical release, it's only digital. At the time, it was said that the first games in the Guild series would be released physically, and the second series games would be released, too. But only three of the four games were made for Guild 02. I believe Mr. Hino [President of Level-5] said he would make the fourth game, but it wasn't made. I don't know if that's the reason, but the second collection wasn’t released physically.

NL: So what are the chances of the game ever being remastered/remade for current consoles?

KA: I was under the assumption that Level-5 owns the IP and there was nothing I could do about releasing it, but I recently realised that Millenium Kitchen is copyrighted as one of the owners of it, so maybe I actually can release it. That's a recent realisation and consideration.

NL: That's good news. I would assume that as a child of the '60s and '70s that you grew up watching and appreciating Ultraman and Kamen Rider? That must have factored into your design of ‘Cleaner Man’ since Cleaner Man is the hero of Attack of the Friday Monsters.

KA: So there's two things I want to say about the Cleaner Man. One is that he's an alien who comes to Earth to fight big monsters, but foremost, he is a cleaning man. He has a dry cleaning company. He's a dry cleaner, and so he was upset because his clothes were dirtied by the monsters. That's his primary beef with the monsters.

And the second part is that, from a developer's point of view and a creator's point of view, I wanted him to win not just through action and as a fighting thing, but there's something about him winning that battle. He wins because he's a cleaning man. Him being a cleaning man is a big part of how he wins that battle. Does that make sense?

NL: Sure it does, but what's interesting about him is that he's actually got one of the most poignant storylines. You don't know much about the father until late in the game, because it's mostly Sohta-chan's story. But I actually got really choked up reading the story because there was a real-life moment when I was a kid going to that summer lake that I mentioned earlier, where my actual father had a similar hero moment. Sohta’s father is a disappointment in a lot of ways, but he’s still a good guy, so when he gets his moment to shine, it’s rather affecting.

KA: Yeah, his mom is dominant.

NL: His mom is kind of the boss, but in these flashbacks, you find out that his father actually came here to be a hero, but he was a failed hero. He didn't live up to the expectations that the alien race had for him. They were like, “You're useless.” And so this is his chance to actually be that hero for his kids, and I was really touched by that.

KA: So, one thing I want to say about this Kaiju title [Interviewer's note: The Romanised Japanese title is Kaiju ga Deru Kinyoubi] is that because I had such a small team, the Kaiju title is the last game that I was involved as much as 90% of the game, like the development, writing the script, and the events and placement of characters and the smallest details. It's the last game I made. After that the scope of the games became so big and there were a lot more members involved in their development. This one is extra special to me because it was the last one that I was involved in 90% of the development.

NL: The last, pure Ayabe game.

KA: So, in Natsu-Mon, because AQURIA was involved, they purposely made or developed it in a way that I would be able to go in and actually touch the script and stuff like that. But, incidentally, because of the lack of time I wasn't able to do it, but they were supportive in setting up the environment where I could have if I wanted to. So, I was not as involved with [writing code] for Natsu-Mon as with the prior titles.

NL: In regards to Attack of the Friday Monsters, I really love the way the game plays out because it does take place over the course of one afternoon or one day. You know, you can feel the time go by as it gets increasingly darker throughout the day.

When you finally get to point where the kaiju comes out, I wasn’t ever really sure up until that point if the kaiju were ever going to come out, or if it was all in the kid's imagination because it's a very chill game.

Because of the game’s title I didn't know what to expect when I first bought the game. I really thought it was going to be a departure from your usual type of game — a kaiju vs. hero game. I should have known better, but it was very, very mellow from the beginning. Kids being kids, running around town, finding things, collecting things, hanging out, challenging each other. It's different from the Bokunatsu series — no bug-catching or anything like that — it just felt like a regular day after school. It almost plays out like a mystery because you're never really sure where it's going to go until stuff starts happening.

My only real disappointment is that we never really get a good look at Cleaner Man, the hero. You're seeing him from a worm's eye view. But we never really get a good look at him as a character.

KA: Well, he does have a proper design. But, you know, he's a mysterious being. So I guess we didn't really get a good look at him. You know, if you go to a lot of different places in the game, you can see him fighting monsters from a lot of different angles. And I think you can probably see his face from certain angles. But, maybe not, I don’t remember.

And finally, let's go back to the series that started it all...