Ys X: Nordics came out in Japan on September 28, 2023. As a big Ys lover in the U.S., I was stuck seeing screenshots, videos, and discussion of the game in Japanese all over the place, but not being able to play it myself. Though I managed to avoid spoilers, there was a sense when it finally hit the States on October 25 of the following year that the game was already an old one, and thus less exciting to discuss. The same thing happened when its updated version, Proud Nordics, dropped on July 31, 2025 in Japan, and February 20, 2026 over here. Sucks!
Most companies don’t do these sorts of staggered releases anymore, but Nippon Ichi Software and its international subsidiary, NIS America, still do for some of their published titles. But that might finally be changing. At PAX West, I spoke to Nippon Ichi CEO and recently appointed NIS America President Kenzo Saruhashi about why the company has been so slow to adopt simultaneous releases. Sure, localization takes time, but most companies nowadays can take that into account and have a release date planned that ensures that work has been done by the time it comes around. Not so for many of NIS America’s published games.
In the past, Saruhashi says, Nippon Ichi and NIS America operated more as two separate companies rather than a subsidiary and a parent company. By uniting them both under his primary leadership, he wants to see that change. To him, that means bringing more games in general west (right now, many of Nippon Ichi’s releases don’t make it to the States), but also bringing them here simultaneously with their Japanese release.
“In the past, a lot of it has been that in many ways we didn’t really have the deciding power to say, ‘We’re going to move forward with the goal of a simultaneous launch’ because we were almost operating as two separate companies,” Saruhashi says. “But now we can really say, [we’re operating] as a whole. And so, there are other factors such as resources and other physical impediments that make it difficult to do a simulship, of course, but I think we’re slowly, gradually able to close that gap thanks to our ability to work a little bit more [cooperatively] as companies.”
Saruhashi tells me that he sees a greater appetite than there used to be for Japanese games in the West, and for Western games in Japan. “Those walls are really coming down, and it feels like it doesn’t really matter so much where the game was made.”
Still, Saruhashi is taking a more direct role over the U.S. division of the company at a tough time for the U.S. and its games industry. I mention the struggles: tariffs, rising costs, chip shortages, layoffs, games flopping, studios closing. While there’s nothing to suggest NIS America is in any danger, it’s still a rough time to be operating over here. Does this impact his business at all? Saruhashi repeatedly tells me it does not.
“So the situation is quite a bit different in the sense that Japanese companies, they don’t really lay off their employees,” he says. “People tend to be lifelong employees of the company most of the time. Now part of that has to do with laws being different in Japan for one thing, but also there’s just a sort of a different cultural thought process about work and your relationship with work and so everyone comes to work with a mindset of: I’m going to be with this company for the rest of my life and I want to contribute to that success, and that helps reflect on me. So I think that may be a part of the discrepancy there.
“There’s also this feeling like, we have a tendency that we want to help people grow and develop within the company and so it’s been a long-standing thing where whether what the Company is doing is profitable, not profitable, it doesn’t really affect our decisions as much in Japan. A lot of companies still have that old-fashioned mindset which I personally am a fan of, but in recent years that’s becoming less and less of a thing in Japan which I feel a little sad about honestly.”
I also spoke with Saruhashi about whether or not the company was using generative AI in development, and his feelings on PlayStation discontinuing physical discs in 2028.
