Maboroshi Artworks' Juan Fandiño Martín on Last Time I Saw You
The story-driven coming-of-age adventure is set to release on PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Xbox on October 10
Juan Fandiño Martín is the founder and creative director of Maboroshi Artworks, an independent, Osaka-based art studio. Its mission, by the studio’s own admission, is to ‘create emotive and innovating stories for you to feel and enjoy’. There’s a fortnight or thereabouts to go until the studio’s maiden release, and Juan is understandably on tenterhooks. “I’m really worried about the marketing and the launch, but I hope it will go fine,” he tells me with a disarming smile over the course of a brief chat about Last Time I Saw You.
A narrative adventure about love and acceptance, set in a Japan of the late 1980s, Last Time I Saw You is based on Juan’s own experiences. “It’s a narrative coming-of-age adventure with some elements of magic realism that is, gameplay-wise, similar to titles like Night in the Woods,” he explains, “The story of the game was inspired by a personal heartbreak that I went through some years ago. The whole process of acceptance and letting go that I underwent was what drove me to create this game.” While Juan the person may have gone through a rough time, Juan the artist interpreted his journey as an interesting learning process and wanted to create something out of it.
A journey eastward
Before we get into the art, it’s instructive to learn a bit about the artist. The Spaniard, a creative director and photographer, has been living in Osaka for the past nine years. “I’ve been drawing and playing games since I was a kid, and I studied visual arts at university. It was during that period of my time I started to become very interested in Japan through cinema,” he recalls. During the course of his studies in Spain, Juan was primarily exposed to European art. As a result, he had to rely on his own research to learn about the Japanese art that fascinated him.
“I realised that there was something in Japan that I found really interesting from an artistic and historical point-of-view and I originally arrived in the country as a photographer,” he says and adds, “I tried to make a living out of it, but could never really get any jobs, so I ended up working in the games industry.” His journey through the world of gaming began as a humble beta tester, before he embarked on a stint as a translator and later, donned the hat of an artist. He finally graduated to the level of art director for a game called Yume Nikki Dream Diary — an adventure-horror game that is a reimagination of the original Yume Nikki.
“I had always played games, but never really thought of making them,” Juan continues, “But after having experienced making a game with a team for a company, I realised this was what I wanted to do.” He notes that it was the combination of gameplay elements with art, music and sound design that made him realise this was what he wanted to do. However, there was a small obstacle to clear first. “I wanted to do a lot more, but perhaps at that company I was not able to. Perhaps it was because what I wanted to do was something more indie or more niche, I don’t know.”
It was around this time that Juan experienced his heartbreak and took the decision to quit his job and began working on Last Time I Saw You. “I officially started working on the game by myself in 2018,” he points out, but it was only in 2020 that he set up Maboroshi Artworks.
Building a game
One of the most interesting aspects of the game is its setting: 1980s Japan. I had experienced versions of this time period in Shenmue andYakuza 0, but Last Time I Saw You quite obviously has a very different take on the era. “As I’d mentioned, I’ve always been interested in Japanese art, particularly the Shōwa era1,” Juan says and elaborates, “It was a time that saw the combination of more traditional Japanese art with a lot of western stuff. And I’ve always found that mix very appealing, because it combines two things that are totally different and create something entirely new.”
Of all the various periods of Japanese history, this is the one that appeals most to him because of how his mind’s eye imagines the way the world looked back then. “Sadly it’s not something I’ve actually experienced myself because I wasn’t even born, but it created an idea in me that I was very attracted to and decided that it made for a nice setting,” adds Juan.
I had the opportunity to play the Last Time I Saw You demo on PlayStation 5 this week and found myself curious, then intrigued, engrossed a little later and bitterly disappointed when I arrived at its conclusion. The whole experience had gone by in what seemed like no more than a heartbeat. I’d had a taste of the sort of gameplay I could expect in the full game, seen a glimmer of the story that awaited me, and experienced a brush with the sort of characters I’d run into. Though it may initially have appeared that way, it became very evident very quickly that this was no ordinary platformer — and there’s a good reason for that.
“In the beginning,” says Juan about his method, “I approach games from the art and narrative standpoint, rather than a ‘Let’s make super-engaging gameplay that will keep you hooked for hours’ perspective.” His background as an artist and the subsequent primacy he has accorded to the visual side of things over the course of his life meant there were always going to be disagreements when developing games.
“I remember I always had this… I wouldn’t call it a fight, but an argument when I was working with other game developers, because my approach was that I wanted things to look a particular way and theirs was that it didn’t seem interesting from a gameplay perspective,” he states, “There was always this more ‘gamey’ or technical aspect that was interfering with the more visual and aesthetic part.”
Experience within the industry and working with others meant that this auteur style would gradually begin to be tempered by a more pragmatic approach. “One of the things that I’ve learned over time is that at the end of the day we’re making a videogame and not a film, a book or an anime, so whatever I make has to work as a videogame,” Juan states, “We have the case of many games that might look beautiful, but as a game they are not so interesting or not so engaging, right?”
This, he reasons, can lead to providing false expectations to players and generally leaving people unhappy. “It’s really difficult when you lean too much into the artistic part, because it could be said that the medium of videogames is less stringent and more ‘casual’,” he says somewhat cryptically and explains, “Basically when you want to play a game, you want to play a game: You want to press buttons, and you want to do things.” It’s this understanding gleaned over the course of his journey that has informed his desire to balancing the visual art with gameplay.
Continuing to build that game
The demo gave me the briefest of glances at what Maboroshi Artworks is cooking, but I got enough of a sense to identify a few reference points: A bit of Studio Ghibli here, some Haruki Murakami-esque situations there and so on. Naturally, there’s a whole host of other influences and references hiding beneath the surface. “My biggest inspiration for Last Time I Saw You gameplay-wise, was Night in the Woods. Even though all the characters are animals, their stories and personalities made them seem like real people to me,” says Juan, who lists the Abe’s Odyssey, Red Dead Redemption and Psychonauts games as some of his all-time favourites.
“Even as a gamer, I’ve usually approached games from the narrative and the artistic perspectives, and so I loved games that offered me believable stories,” he continues, “When I played Night in the Woods, I remember thinking I would’ve enjoyed it more if it had some more ‘gamey’ elements like inventory, collectibles and stuff like that.” Another game Juan lists as a major inspiration is the mutant soap opera Mutazione. Once again, the common factor was that the game included characters to whom he could relate. “Also, the themes were more realistic, they were dealing with relationships and life crises, and the game did a really good job making me care about the fate of those characters,” he adds.
Describing the time when he was playing the game as one when he’d go to sleep looking forward to waking up and finding out how the story of certain characters would progress, Juan proceeds to reveal one of his biggest inspirations and reference points. “In order to write believable, realistic and interesting characters, the biggest influence, not only for me but also our narrative designer, has been Disco Elysium,” he says. Of course Last Time I Saw You has absolutely nothing to do with the dreary world of Detective Harry Du Bois and Disco Elysium, but the manner in which the game’s characters were fleshed out and made to feel real had a profound effect on Juan.
“The writing also made me confident about tackling stuff that wasn’t necessary family-friendly,” he admits, “Topics like tobacco, alcohol or sexual content — even though there’s none of the latter in Last Time I Saw You — are real human topics; topics that people can relate to in a ‘Maybe I didn’t deal with this situation in the best way and I regret it, but that simultaneously makes me human’ kind of way’.” Beyond games, Juan lists Studio Ghibli films and the aesthetics of some Makoto Shinkai movies as major inspirations.
To recap, there was the original heartbreak that set the wheels in motion, there was an idea about the narrative and art style, and a desire to give players something to do. All that was left was to build the game. And as it turned out, despite starting up the studio in 2020, it was only in 2022 that things got rolling. “Officially, I began working on Last Time I Saw You in 2018, but it wasn’t until 2022 that I got the funding to work on it full-time,” he recalls, “While the team did change over time, our core members in programming, narrative design, music, animation and sound remained intact.” He mentions that he handled all the art of the game in order to ‘save some costs’.
And this brings us to the biggest challenge Juan faced on his quest to make Last Time I Saw You: Gathering funds. “There is the solo dev approach wherein you learn everything and you do it everything yourself, but it was not the case for me — I am not a programmer, I am not a musician and I needed people in those roles,” he says, “The most challenging part of this development was to find someone that believed in the project and gave me the money to pay the team and complete the game.”
This doesn’t come as a surprise since one of the most common refrains among indie developers, particularly in the current climate, is that raising funds for your game is the hardest thing you’ll have to do. “That was an interesting one, and I learned a lot,” divulges Juan, “My first time searching for publishers was in 2020. In total, I did around three rounds of pitching until I found the publisher who would go on to finance the game — Chorus Worldwide.” Interestingly, he believes this was the right way to do it, and that even if he could go back in time and get funding at an earlier stage, he wouldn’t do it.
“I realised that when you show something to publishers and pretty much everyone says no, maybe I was not doing something right,” he reflects, “Those rounds of feedback were really important, because if we’d gotten funding earlier, the game would have turned into something else.” It becomes clear over the course of our conversation — through such topics as heartbreak and rejection — that Juan is one of those who thrives on adversity. “I guess even if it’s tough to handle rejection, it’s very important because when you are working on a game or anything really, and you are really focused on it, you can lose track of things other people can see,” he says, and puts into perspective his own experience of working with feedback until his game was ready for funding.
Countdown to October 10
With hardly any time to go until the game’s launch, producers Chorus are currently exhibiting Last Time I Saw You at the ongoing Tokyo Game Show. So if you haven’t yet played the demo on Steam or PS5 and happen to be in Tokyo, please check it out for yourselves. For everyone else, I throw it back to Juan to tell me why people should play his game. “I think playing Last Time I Saw You will be interesting for people who may be able to relate to some of the events that take place in the game — maybe they have gone through similar circumstances in their own lives,” he offers.
“Aside from the story of the main protagonist, there are also multiple NPCs who have their own unique stories. We wrote them in a way to show how everyone goes through a similar process of letting go, but each of them deal with it in different ways,” Juan adds, “And then there are problems with family, friends, people whom we love, people who love us but we don’t love back etc. And perhaps by going through these stories, players could find some common ground and say, ‘Oh, this happened to me’ or ‘I understand this’.”
And if that’s not enough to entice you, the charming Last Time I Saw You features a dark curse, samurai crows, kleptomaniac kappas and a girl who only shows up in your dreams. I’ll be reviewing the game as soon as I can get hold of it, and so, keep watching this space.
An historical period of Japanese history corresponding to the reign of Emperor Shōwa from December 25, 1926, until his death on January 7, 1989.