18 Facts About Monolith Soft

Monolith Soft was founded in 1999 by Tetsuya Takahashi with the support and cooperation of Masaya Nakamura, the founder of Namco.

Design approaches of Monolith Soft have shifted over its lifetime, with early games such as Xenosaga and Baten Kaitos being distinguished by a narrative-heavy approach, while later games have focused more on gameplay.

Monolith Soft's stated goals are to create projects with wide creative freedom and to allow younger developers to contribute to these projects.

Monolith Soft is notable for its focus on promoting a comfortable working environment with little to no overtime in contrast to the majority of other Japanese game developers, alongside collaborating with other studios and companies.

Monolith Soft was founded by Tetsuya Takahashi, a developer who had previously worked at Nihon Falcom and later at Square, in which the latter was merged into Enix in 2003 to form Square Enix.

Related searches

An important supporter of Monolith Soft was Namco's founder Masaya Nakamura, who shared many of Takahashi and Sugiura's goals and ideals.

Monolith Soft is noted as being one of a group of video game companies—alongside Sacnoth, Love-de-Lic and Mistwalker—founded by Square staff who had worked on notable games produced during the 1990s.

Monolith Soft was officially founded on 1 October 1999 by Takahashi, Sugiura, and Yasuyuki Honne, who had worked at Square on both the Chrono series and with Takahashi on Xenogears.

Monolith Soft continued to work for the company in a supervisory role by providing the series' scenario drafts, while younger staff continued the series development.

In May 2002, Monolith Soft moved from Yokohama to their current offices in Meguro, Tokyo.

Monolith Soft underwent changes and Monolith Soft felt they were being given less creative freedom, and the newly-created Bandai Namco was less willing to take creative risks.

Monolith Soft then received consultation from Shinji Hatano, an executive director at Nintendo, who advised them to continue creating innovative projects.

Nintendo's acquisition of Monolith Soft contrasted against the company's previous publicized approach of not taking part in mergers and acquisitions of other studios and companies.

Monolith Soft was chosen to develop Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans due to their pedigree at developing RPGs.

In 2011, Monolith Soft founded a new studio in Kyoto, closer to Nintendo's home base so the two companies could better interact with each other.

Monolith Soft developed a sequel to Project X Zone, Project X Zone 2.

Monolith Soft opened new studios in Nakameguro and Iidabashi during 2017 and 2018.

Rather than a fixed development structure, Monolith Soft chooses to freely assign staff based on the direction a project takes, in addition to believing in collaborations with other companies on projects rather than developing entirely in-house.