Toshihiro Kondo, the frequent director and writer of both the long-running Trails and Ys series, doesn't see other Japanese RPGs as competitors - rather, growing interest in the subgenre as a whole can only be a good thing.
"Rather than a feeling of competitiveness, it's more a feeling of cooperation," the veteran developer and studio president said in an interview with GameSpot. "We've been making games for a very long time - since the 1980s - and back then JRPGs didn't have a lot of success or popularity. And so a big contributor to our genre's growing success is these companies like Atlus who have these great games that come out regularly."
