A week had passed.
Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo.
The streets here were always crowded, with suited salarymen and young people in eccentric outfits mingling together, forming this city's unique ecosystem.
The headquarters of Enix Corporation was located in an office building here.
There were no exaggerated giant signs or overwhelming game posters; the entire building exuded the steady, traditional air of a publishing enterprise.
Takuya Nakayama stepped out of his car.
He did not bring any entourage today, walking into the building alone.
The receptionist checked the appointment list and respectfully guided him to a dedicated elevator.
A fixed perception had long circulated in the industry.
Since the Famicom era, Enix had been firmly tied to Nintendo's chariot, and the *Dragon Quest* series was the stabilizer for Nintendo's hardware sales.
In this company's resume, there had never been a record of releasing a game on a Sega console.
The outside world naturally concluded that even if there wasn't an irreconcilable conflict between Enix and Sega, there was at least a lot of mutual antipathy.
This black-and-white logic of taking sides seemed overly childish in a mature business society.
The outside world naturally assumed that even if there weren't irreconcilable conflicts between Enix and Sega, there would at least be a fair amount of mutual animosity.
Such black-and-white, pick-a-side logic seems overly naive in a mature business society.
There is no inherent hatred between companies, only considerations of profit distribution.
True, life-or-death camp rivalries exist only among hardware platform holders like Sega, Nintendo, and Sony.
For third-party software developers, the essence is profit-seeking.
Wherever there is a sufficient installed base, more favorable royalty policies, or a hardware environment better suited to their development needs, that is where they will flock.
The elevator reached the upper floors. The metal doors slid open to the sides.
President Keiji Honda was already waiting in the hallway.
He was wearing a dark gray bespoke suit, his hair combed meticulously—the typical style of a traditional Japanese corporate executive.
The two shook hands, exchanged business cards, and then walked side-by-side into the president's office.
The office layout was very orderly.
There were no flashy decorations; the massive bookshelf against the wall drew the focus of the room.
The shelves displayed not only physical cartridges and packaging for every generation of *Dragon Quest* but were also packed with manga volumes published under Enix's banner, such as *Monthly Shōnen Gangan*.
This company didn't just make games; it also had deep roots in the publishing industry.
A secretary served two cups of Shizuoka sencha, the white porcelain cups steaming.
She bowed slightly, exited the room, and closed the door behind her.
Nakayama Takuya did not choose to warm up with small talk about the weather or industry gossip.
He picked up his teacup to moisten his throat and went straight to the point.
She bowed slightly, exited the room, and closed the door.
Takuya Nakayama did not choose to warm up with small talk about the weather or industry gossip.
He picked up his teacup to moisten his throat and cut straight to the point.
"President Honda, Sega formally invites Enix to bring the latest mainline sequel of *Dragon Quest* to the Jupiter platform."
Keiji Honda's hand, holding his teacup, stopped in mid-air.
He placed the cup steadily back onto the coffee table.
"Executive Director Nakayama has always been direct in his dealings." Keiji Honda leaned back against the leather chair, folding his hands in front of him. "*Dragon Quest* is Enix's lifeblood. Switching release platforms is a strategic shift for us that would have repercussions on everything else. It requires extremely careful consideration."
"The goal of a strategic shift is to avoid strategic stagnation," Nakayama tossed out his prepared argument. "Too much time has passed since the last mainline sequel was released. The loyalty of the core fan base is unquestionable; they will wait patiently.
"But the attention of the new generation of gamers is being carved up by blockbuster titles filled with 3D polygons and flashy CG. If a national-level RPG is absent from the latest generation of hardware for too long, the social influence and market dominance of its IP will slowly be diluted by time."
Keiji Honda did not speak up to refute this.
This was precisely the topic that had been repeatedly debated at Enix's internal planning meetings.
"Nintendo's new console, the N64, is moving too slowly," Takuya Nakayama continued, pushing the conversation forward. "What's worse, they are insisting on using cartridges as the game medium."
At the mention of cartridges, Keiji Honda furrowed his brows.
"The storage capacity bottleneck is a glaring physical limitation," Takuya Nakayama said, gesturing toward the game boxes on the bookshelf. "The world-building of *Dragon Quest* is becoming increasingly massive, and the volume of narrative text is growing exponentially. If you add high-quality orchestral music and lengthy cutscenes, all of that requires a massive amount of storage space. The N64's cartridge capacity limit is severely restricted.
"It simply can't hold a next-gen RPG. If we were to force it in, the development team would have to resort to extreme asset compression, sacrificing graphical fidelity and sound quality. In this era, which emphasizes audiovisual impact, that is going against the tide."
"The read speeds of optical discs have always been an issue," Keiji Honda raised a technical objection. "RPG players hate long loading screens when switching scenes. It seriously destroys immersion."
"The dual-speed optical drive used by Jupiter, combined with a large data cache, has already brought load times down to a threshold acceptable to players. You can see this in the performance of Jupiter's 'Phantasy Star' and PlayStation's 'Fairy Warrior'; players' acceptance in this regard is not low." Takuya Nakayama provided the technical explanation. "In contrast, the high manufacturing cost of cartridges is the Sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of third-party developers. The production cycle for N64 cartridges is long, requiring orders to be placed with Nintendo months in advance, which ties up a massive amount of capital. Once a market forecast is off and sales fall short of expectations, the cartridges piling up in the warehouse will directly crush the cash flow of a medium-sized company."
Keiji Honda adjusted his sitting posture.
Enix had always adhered to an asset-light operating model.
The high-risk, heavy-asset inventory model of games ran directly counter to their business philosophy.
"President Honda, everyone knows about Enix's relationship with the publishing industry, and you must have had plenty of contact with it. What is the core logic of the publishing industry? It's extremely low reproduction costs and the ability to distribute products quickly." Takuya Nakayama dissected the underlying commercial differences. "The cost of pressing an optical disc is less than one-tenth that of a cartridge, and the production cycle takes only a few days. This logic is identical to that of printing manga volumes. The cartridge model that Nintendo insists on belongs to the logic of traditional heavy-asset manufacturing, which runs counter to Enix's DNA."
"Furthermore, I suspect the N64 development environment still hasn't fully converged even now," Takuya Nakayama said, cutting into a deeper technical pain point. "The workstations provided by SGI offer powerful performance, but their microcode programming system is extremely complex. This directly leads to the biggest problem Enix is currently facing—a mismatch in development systems."
Enix's operating model is unique in the entire Japanese game industry.
When Square encountered a technical upgrade, their approach was to simply throw money at it, recruiting a massive number of top-tier programmers, 3D modelers, and CG animators to build a large development team of hundreds, internalizing and solving technical difficulties in-house.
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