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."
"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.”
