Takaya Imamura is probably best known among video game fans for his work on classic Nintendo games.
During his epic 32-year tenure at the legendary Kyoto-based video game company, he helped design iconic characters for games such as Star Fox, F-ZeroAnd The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Maskand later directed a small number of popular 3DS titles such as Steel Diver, Steel Diver: Submarine WarsAnd Tank soldiersBut in 2022, he announced that he would make the difficult decision to leave the company that had given him the start to go independent and eventually began working on a science fiction ADV called Omega 6: The Triangular Stars for Nintendo Switch and PC.
This game has already been released in Japan and is set to be released in the West sometime in 2025. It is based on Omega 6, a manga he wrote shortly after leaving Nintendo. It is about a pair of bounty hunters named Thunder and Kyra on a quest to find humanity’s next home. This manga is currently only available in French and Japanese (although Dark Horse Comics has already announced that it will also publish an English version in the future).
Recently, Imamura was kind enough to sit down with us and answer some of our questions about this exciting new project. He told us why he had to leave Nintendo to start this latest chapter of his career and gave us some insight into its origins and design, including whether he originally envisioned the title as a cross-media project.
“At first, I only had manga in mind,” Imamura tells us when asked if the game was part of his original plans. “I was asked about an adventure game project and I felt it would fit well with the manga I’ve been creating.”
What’s particularly fascinating about Imamura’s latest career move is that it actually represents a full-circle moment for the artist. Before joining Nintendo, he always wanted to be a mangaka, and is even said to have shown Shigeru Miyamoto a manga he’d created during his first interview for a job at Nintendo in 1989. Growing up, some of his biggest heroes were artists like Osamu Tezuka, Akira Toriyama, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Mobius, and he always believed that manga was a “wonderful” profession due to its combination of “storytelling, composition, and character design.”
Only because of the Famicom boom and its preference for games like Zanac, MetroidAnd Starlightthat he started thinking about a job in the video game industry. That and his feeling that it would be an uphill battle to succeed as a cartoonist.
He recalls: “I got into this industry because there was a big NES boom at the time when I was looking for a job and I loved video games. The chances of success as a cartoonist were also very slim at the time.”
Initially, Imamura thought he could design the packaging for new Famicom titles, but eventually he became a key collaborator at Nintendo for SNES titles such as F-Zero, Star Fox, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the PastAnd Stunt Racing FXbefore becoming art director for games such as The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and StarFox 64During his time at the company, he also served as supervisor for third-party titles, such as Rares Star Fox Adventures and Amusement Vision’s F-Zero GXand got the chance to lead a handful of smaller, more experimental projects.
However, when speaking to us, he made it clear that he believes working on a game like Omega 6 would never have been on the cards at the time of his departure from his previous employer, due to the challenges that come with launching a new IP in the current entertainment climate.
“I think it would have been impossible to make this game at Nintendo!” he tells us. “I think this game was only possible because we went independent (…) New IPs have a really hard time in all entertainment genres. We were lucky to be able to launch Omega 6 in such a situation!”
According to Imamura, he and his development partners initially considered making Omega 6: The Triangle Stars a direct adaptation of the manga before deciding to create an “original story” set in the same world and featuring the same characters.
This story unfolds across an ADV-like interface, with players being presented with a 2D view of the world around them before being given the opportunity to select an action from a list of available verbs (move, speak, examine, etc.). This type of setup will look familiar to anyone who has played ADV-like games in the past (like Famicom Detective Club or Snapper). However, the game also introduces a somewhat unconventional combat system modeled after the concept of rock, paper, scissors (or “janken” as it’s called in Japan). In battles, players take turns with an enemy to select one of three icons representing these various objects, with an additional fourth icon available to access the inventory.
Imamura explains: “Basically, we chose rock-paper-scissors as the game format because it is not an RPG and we wanted to make the battles easy to understand and simple. There are many battle scenes in the original work, so we decided from the beginning to incorporate some kind of battle into the game.”
As one of our final questions, we asked Imamura how the English localization is coming along, and learned that there will be more news later this month at Gamescom (where he will also be appearing).
He also hinted that he was excited about the possibility of a sequel, telling us that he and the team “still have a lot of things planned for the original” and that they “would love to do the next installment.”
