I am not a game designer.

I have attempted to make games at various points in the past, making use of toolsets ranging from Atari BASIC through STOS: The Game Creator, Klik & Play, The Games Factory, RPG Maker (of various flavours) and all manner of other things — but one thing has been constant: I’ve never gotten anything finished. And, as such, I have developed a good understanding of quite how much work goes into even the most seemingly simple project.

With that in mind, I always find myself gritting my teeth a bit any time I see people being unnecessarily disparaging about certain game developers. Whether it’s an entitled prick on Steam calling an indie dev “lazy” for not building their passion project to one ungrateful gamer’s specific expectations, or targeted campaigns of harassment against larger companies for one reason or another, I can never get behind that sort of behaviour.

One particular example of this that I’ve found particularly galling over the course of the last decade and a bit in particular is the attitude some folks take towards Japanese developer-publisher Idea Factory. Said people think it’s absolutely hilarious to refer to the company as “Idea Fuck” — presumably because they couldn’t think of a better pun — and rarely have anything complementary to say about the company’s output.

It’s also worth noting at the same time that the reason these people rarely have anything complementary to say about the company’s output is because they don’t really know anything about the company’s output. And as such, they tend to fall back on generic criticisms — often, as things tend to go in this day and age, pointing out “problematic” instances of mildly provocative artwork without context rather than actually engaging with the works in question.

If you’ve been reading MoeGamer for any length of time, you’ll know that I have a lot of time for Idea Factory and its subsidiaries (whom we shall simply collectively refer to as “Idea Factory” for the remainder of this piece for convenience’s sake) as well as the variety of work they’ve put out between them over the years.

The long-running Neptunia series is one of the main reasons I became interested in Japanese gaming in the first place, and over the course of MoeGamer’s lifetime we’ve covered a number of titles from the company in great depth, including Megadimension Neptunia V-II, MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death, Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online, Death End re;Quest, Gun Gun Pixies and numerous others — and these won’t be the last you’ll see of the company on here by a long shot.

I even went so far as to declare Idea Factory subsidiary Compile Heart my Developer of the Decade as 2019 drew to a close, so significant did I consider their improvement to have been since my first contact with them nearly ten years earlier. And I know that I’m far from the only one who gladly picks up pretty much anything they put out without any misplaced sense of shame, guilt or any other feelings you might want to mention to a fan of something supposedly “controversial”.

So why all the negativity? Well, a lot of it stems from the fact that Idea Factory has historically done things rather on the low-budget end of the spectrum compared to their contemporaries.

Back when I first encountered them during the middle of the PS3 era, for example, their titles such as the first Hyperdimension Neptunia were often derided for their technical shortcomings such as low frame rates, low-resolution graphics and frequently reused assets.

These days, their games are better, but they’re still noticeably more cheaply put together than the work of other companies. Compare, say, an Idea Factory game to Square Enix’s latest Final Fantasy installment at any given moment in history and it will look like there’s a console generation or more in between them in terms of visual fidelity and overall technical ambition.

Here’s the thing, though: that’s not a bad thing in and of itself. Idea Factory has a particular way of doing things that evidently works for them, and works for their audience, too. And that approach is pretty much the polar opposite of the big-budget, cinematic approach that larger developers and publishers have been continuing to favour as gaming technology constantly improves over time.

Idea Factory titles pretty much without fail feature a heavy degree of abstraction in their presentation, with narrative sequences typically represented using visual novel-style scenes that focus on the dialogue and character designs rather than presenting explicit all-out action. The player is left to imagine certain details of the scenes they are witnessing rather than seeing absolutely everything as it happens.

Sometimes this is used for comic effect, subverting the audience’s expectations by appearing to be referring to one thing but actually revealing it to be something else. And sometimes it’s simply a stylistic choice, allowing the player to involve themselves in the narrative by “filling in the blanks” for themselves.

Indeed, a significant string to Idea Factory’s bow is their Otomate division, who have been pushing out some of the best otome games — visual novels specifically aimed at a female audience — for many years now. Most of these games completely eschew what we’d traditionally describe as “gameplay” in favour of interesting, often complex and thought-provoking narratives told through relatively simple and straightforward but nonetheless effective presentation.

In the games that aren’t pure visual novels, gameplay mechanics present interesting new twists on classic formulae.

The original Hyperdimension Neptunia features an in-depth combo system quite unlike anything you’ll see in any other RPG.

Death End re;Quest features a delightful mechanic where certain special moves temporarily switch the “genre” of the game while you deal damage in various ways.

MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death blends classic dungeon-crawling action with the in-depth mech customisation of the Metal Max series.

Mary Skelter features some of the best use of “risk versus reward” you’ll ever see in an RPG. And there are myriad more examples.

And here’s the thing that “Idea Fuck” types don’t seem to get: people like all this. A new Otomate title is a huge deal for the otome community; an announcement of one being localised for English speakers, even more so. A new Neptunia game is a significant moment for fans of anime-style games. The launch of a new series such as Death End re;Quest or Mary Skelter is an exciting thing to see for those who follow the developer. So they’re doing something right along the way. What is it?

In a word: soul. Idea Factory games are packed with soul. One gets the impression playing through pretty much anything that Idea Factory puts out that the people behind the game in question absolutely loved what they were creating, warts and all. It doesn’t matter to them that their game doesn’t have the most sprawling open-world in all of gaming, or that its technical performance isn’t the best. They’ve created a setting, a cast of characters and a narrative that they genuinely believe in — and they’re going to make their audience feel that passion to the best of their ability.

I felt this almost immediately after starting to play Hyperdimension Neptunia, my first Idea Factory title, for the very first time, way back in 2010 or so. This was a game that felt like it had been laser-focused on the exact things I enjoy. It wasn’t exclusionary of anyone outside of that target audience, but it likewise wasn’t attempting to spread itself too thin to appeal to as diverse a demographic as possible. It simply took aim for the very specific people it wanted to appeal to, and it did its best to appeal to them like absolute buggery.

This holds true for pretty much every Idea Factory game I’ve played since. Every single Idea Factory game, regardless of how “good” you might think it is from an “objective” perspective (not that such a thing really exists when dealing with subjective opinions, but let’s not get into that now) is designed with that same feeling of passion. These are charming, charismatic, soulful games that have personality about them; they want to be loved, even while they’re aware of their own limitations and flaws. And that’s what makes them such a joy to play.

Not only that, but this is a company that, while it has clearly found a niche for itself, refuses to stand still or stagnate. Each new Idea Factory title is an improvement on a previous one — or, at the very least, an attempt to branch off in a new direction. You only have to look at the constant experimentation and gradually expanding sense of ambition within the Neptunia series to see that at work — move out to the company’s broader output and it’s even more evident.

All this is something that makes Idea Factory stand out to an increasingly prominent degree as time goes on. As the big-budget end of gaming plays things increasingly safe year-on-year with annualised installments that always feel like they’ve been designed by a combination of business committee and focus group, Idea Factory resolutely sticks to what it’s good at and what has proven to work for its audience over the course of the last decade or so.

And that, to me, is very much worthy of respect. There aren’t a lot of non-indie developer-publishers out there these days that can honestly claim to be doing what Idea Factory do in quite the same way. (Nippon Ichi Software is one great example, so we’ll talk about them another day.)

For that reason, Idea Factory will always be high on my list of developer-publishers to watch — and I’ll happily take a chance on anything they care to put out. Now, I just need to make the time to catch up on all the games I’ve bought from them but haven’t gotten around to playing yet!

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More about Megadimension Neptunia V-II
More about MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death
More about Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online
More about Death End re;Quest
More about Gun Gun Pixies

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Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.

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