Trails lead doesn’t see hits like Persona 5 as “rivals,” reckons it’s “a good thing” that the West is finally “hungry” for more JRPGs

Toshihiro Kondo, the frequent director and writer of both the long-running Trails and Ys series, doesn’t see other Japanese RPGs as competitors – rather, growing interest in the subgenre as a whole can only be a good thing.

“Rather than a feeling of competitiveness, it’s more a feeling of cooperation,” the veteran developer and studio president said in an interview with GameSpot. “We’ve been making games for a very long time – since the 1980s – and back then JRPGs didn’t have a lot of success or popularity. And so a big contributor to our genre’s growing success is these companies like Atlus who have these great games that come out regularly.”

Atlus has been somewhat of a genre powerhouse since they began pumping out games in the Shin Megami Tensei series – which itself spawned popular spin-off series such as Persona and Soul Hackers – starting all the way back in 1987. After decades in the game, Atlus is having maybe its best year ever with best-selling releases of Persona 3 Reload and Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance, as well as the upcoming Metaphor ReFantazio.

But while Atlus continues releasing acclaimed JRPGs, Kondo feels like “less studios are making them” these days, despite the “Western market” and its growing appetite for the genre, even pointing to Capcom and Konami as two publishers who have largely abandoned their once-popular JRPG series.

“So it’s a very limited market which is a shame because if the market’s hungry for something, you have to have a constant supply to satisfy those people and maintain it,” Kondo continued. “So, rather than seeing Atlus, for example, as a rival–although I can’t speak to Mr. Hajime – I see when their games come out as a good thing. It means the market’s being satisfied and more and more people are learning about what makes JRPGs great.”

Elsewhere, the president said that Trails developers are working on new IPs because making the same JRPG series for 20 years leads to stagnation, while the Trails series itself is “about 80-90% complete.”