Earlier this morning, the president of NanaOn-Sha, Masaya Matsuura, popped by the theatre room in a bright pink flower hawaiian-style shirt, rather than in a standard blazer that most people of his stature and caliber would wear. To further represent his offbeatness of his company and his passion, he also showed off a pair of trailers: one for “Major Minor’s Majestic March”, his recent collaboration with his partner Rodney Greenblat (who also worked on Masaya’s Parappa The Rapper), and another new project for Japanese mobile phones called “ens ens”.

The trailer itself is a weird-as-heck sketch featuring the rabbit from Vib Ribbon asking a random NanaOn-Sha employee about ens ens. Essentially, ens ens is a ‘game’ in which you generate music from your numeric keypad of your handphone. He also elaborated later on that with the speed of recognizing new pieces of music and production using the commonly-used Yamaha soundtrack chip on most handphones, it’s easy to bring in ens ens to the mass market.

Throughout his whole presentation, he was  sharing to us about how much music and games have evolved and worked hand in hand. He enlightened the crowd about how fares like Super Mario Bros. used music to highlight cues and accentuate the feel of games, as well as introducing new ways to bring in music to the gaming genre, like ethnic music.

As proof of his new endeavor, he proceeded to show off ens ens to the crowd on the hardest setting. Naturally, the crowd applauded. While it’s coming out exclusively for Japan “probably next year”, according to Masaya, he’s definitely planning on sharing the love worldwide.

I also had the fortunate opportunity to meet up with the man himself, and he does have quite a few gems to spill:

- After Parappa’s launching 1996, he had the chance with the people from Harmonix who were in Tokyo at the time. After they showed off their prototype of their then-game which resembled something more to Amplitude rather than their current Rock Band games, and also uses a flight simulator joystick, he told them that their tech implementation and aspect is great, but they need to concentrate more on the game. This perhaps launched Harmonix into their path of music games to this day.

- He’s definitely been asked time and again to make another “Parappa The Rapper” game. “Parappa is kind of an important brand,” he says, ” so I always think of new products and ideas and work the character Parappa into them. But I think it requires various kind of ingredients that no one’s ever thought of yet. Or just time. Lots of time.”

- He feels that the basic motivation to make a game is different in the Western world than compared to the East. “I really don’t understand how Western developers are fascinated with the violence, or violent aspect, in their videogames.”

- What about Tamagotchi Connection, a DS series of games done by NanaOn-Sha? “I never switch [genres]. We’re just trying various aspects of gaming whenever we have the chance. Experimenting, if you will.” He also emphasizes that NanaOn-Sha “is not a character-designing company and not like other game developers. We always ask our publishers to offer those part of the aesthetics, thus putting us in a “blue sky”(that phase in pre-production in games developing) situation.”

- His current platform of choice to work on? The PS3. “I have no special reasons, but I want to move [development platform] to PS3. We’ve done the DS, PS1, and Wii already. I wish I could work on the Xbox 360, but we don’t have Xbox experience yet. It’s good timing for us too, given at its hardware and how cheap (for developers) it is for us.”

-  “I know that the Rock Band/Guitar Hero phenomena is huge,” Masaya says concerning the progression of music games, “but this kind of success very complicated. The developers on their respective teams did a good job by making their products attractive, but suddenly they’re being clouded by these other bigger conglomerates. Advertisements, approaching other individuals in the business to increase their own product base:  this is a very big change from what happened [10 years or so ago].”

- Rhythm based games “for me have been gone 15 years ago. It seems no one is planning to develop  a different style for this particular category. Anyone who wishes to make a new music-based game will have to try a new challenge.

- He’s not a big fan of peripherals. In his talk, he did mention that it gets in the way of the game at hand. He would much rather have the peripheral itself contain the music of the game and acting as a hub, rather than an extra big and stylized controller.

There you have it. Masaya Matsuura: musician, game designer, all-around wellspring of ideas to converge music and gaming into one harmonious blend.