"There's still a bit of work to do to attract new players" - ArcSysWorks' Daisuke Ishiwatari on Guilty Gear Strive, the game's legacy, and more

During the Arc World Tour finals, I had a chance to speak to Daisuke Ishiwatari, Ken Miyauchi, and Akira Katano from Arc System Works. If those names are familiar, they should be. Daisuke Ishiwatari is the creator of Guilty Gear, Ken Miyauchi is the producer of Strive, and Akira Katano is the director. As a long-time fan of both Guilty Gear and especially BlazBlue, it was a real pleasure to be able to speak with the three of them through a translator.

Sadly, we couldn't get all our questions answered as we had limited time for our chat. The others should hopefully be answered in the near future, and we’ll edit those in at a later date.

We also had another minor technical error, where our first question didn’t get recorded. I asked Daisuke Ishiwatari, a man who wears many hats, which role he likes the most. According to the Guilty Gear creator, whatever he’s doing at the time - whether it’s writing, composing, or designing characters - that’s what he enjoys doing the most.

Daisuke Ishiwatari: Back then when I was first creating Guilty Gear, I was just a young man with a lot of creative juices and I just wanted to create something. So I was really in the moment and I wasn't really thinking about the future. But if I, right now, 25 years later, went back in time and told my younger self that, hey, Guilty Gear is still going, it's still popular, I think my younger self would be very surprised.

Ken Miyauchi: For me when I first started getting in touch with Arc System Works, it was BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. And, I've been playing BlazBlue for the whole series, and at that time I was just a college student and had never expected that I would work in Arc System Works. And, even if I graduated, I went with a totally different