Asura's Wrath reaction no surprise to Matsuyama, dot Hack for NA needs more fan support

CyberConnect2's president Hiroshi Matsuyama was signing autographs at Wondercon in Anaheim, CA this past weekend, and he kindly took a break from showing off his latest game – Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations – to chat with us about how his other games are doing.

And by "other games" we of course mean the one with the god destroyer: Asura's Wrath. Despite both critical acclaim and a strong sales start, Matsuyama is still cautious about the new IP. "It's only been a month since it's been out," Matsuyama told Joystiq through a translator. He said that he expected both positive and negative reactions, and that's what he got. "Obviously, it was a challenge to create something new. And when you try to do that, obviously the people that get it will enjoy it. But for people where the game doesn't fit their expectations, they're not going to jump up as much."

We also checked in on both the dot Hack title in progress as well as a possible sequel to Solatorobo, but for both of those, Matsuyama says he needs more support from North American publishers. For dot Hack specifically, "as long as we can get more requests from the fans, there's a possibility." But he there are other factors in play as well. "It's not that people don't know about it," he said. "But I think it's more than Namco Bandai Games America is not interested in the typical JRPGs and that's why they're not looking to pick it up."

Matsuyama said he's not trying to make directly Japanese or Western games, however. "It's most important to be able to see the whole world. Back in the day, a lot of developers and publishers were focused on Japanese games and sent them out to North America. Obviously that's not going to be accepted as much. From our standpoint, we're really looking to create a game that's fun for everybody in the world."

That said, we kindly asked Matsuyama to show us what might be the next evolution of the Asura pose, given that we've seen it twice already so far. But because Matsuyama happened to be in the Namco booth and not the Capcom booth (not to mention that he was dressed up as Naruto anyway), we got the very serene pose above. In other words, the Asura Pose has evolved yet again.