Today is the 20th birthday of Super Sonico, the cute singer who became the face of Nitro Plus, the legendary Japanese visual novel and anime production company. To celebrate, let’s take a deep dive into the history of the company that brought us some of the best-told stories in game and anime form. Please enjoy this Complete History of Nitro Plus, with extra tidbits about the company that I observed through many years working with them!
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These have been a nostalgic couple of weeks for me, writing about the history of J-List and JAST USA to celebrate our 30th anniversary, and reminiscing about how we were able to bring so many amazing products to fans around the world. A big part of that story involves our partnership with Nitro Plus, one of my favorite companies!
What is Nitro Plus?
Before Nitro Plus became a name familiar to anime and eroge fans, they made educational software for kids and content for i-Mode, an early mobile platform popular in Japan before the iPhone’s release. Founder Takaki “Digitaro” Kosaka had worked for Gainax and the legendary anime studio Studio Nue, and helped shape Tokyo’s early otaku scene.
One day, one of his writers, Gen Urobuchi, got bored with educational software and asked to try a side project: an 18+ visual novel in the spirit of Leaf’s Kizuato. For about eighteen months, the staff worked on the visual novel in the evenings after finishing their normal work. That project would become Phantom of Inferno, the company’s first hit, reaching its sales goal of 20,000 copies.
Many more visual novels would follow. The deliciously dark Lovecraftian VN Saya no Uta, which got a full HD remaster from JAST a few years ago. Deus Machina Demonbane, which sets giant-robot action in the Cthulhu Mythos. And Full Metal Daemon: Muramasa, one of the most popular dark VNs of all time. The company’s Nitro+ Chiral division has created some of the most iconic BL games ever, which are some of the top sellers on the newly updated JAST online store.
Then Nitro Plus partnered with 5pb. to create Steins;Gate, about a mad scientist otaku who invents a machine that can send messages into the past, which ends up changing the future. Our game release was so popular that the first print run of 6,000 copies sold out on the first day.
How Nitro Plus Became an Anime Powerhouse
But making visual novels is hard work, and you never know how many fans are going to show up to buy your next release, especially since games have always sold for $90 in Japan. So in the 2010s, the company turned its attention to the anime industry, partnering with other companies to help create some of the best anime stories out there.
The list of anime Nitro Plus worked on is long. Anime based on stories the company created include Phantom, DRAMAtical Murder, Super Sonico, and Touken Ranbu. Then we have the dark and fascinating stories written by Urobuchi, including Madoka Magica, Fate/Zero, Psycho-Pass, Aldnoah.Zero, and Expelled from Paradise.
Nitro Plus also worked on the three Godzilla anime films on Netflix. These shows have terrible CGI animation, but the stories are amazing. Set 20,000 years in the future, the stories depict a world where Godzilla has become so powerful that humans had to leave Earth. That’s the most Urobuchi story ever!
Where Did Super Sonico Come From? The Origin of Nitro Plus’s Famous Mascot
Super Sonico was created to be the face of the company’s musical events. Illustrator Tsuji Santa designed Sonico, who debuted at a Nitro Plus live concert on October 14, 2006, 20 years ago today.
- Tsuji Santa designed Sonico to be bouncy and fun, sharply contrasting with the dark and intense games the company traditionally produces. Actually, “hardcore” Nitro Plus fans actively dislike the character for making “moe” part of the Nitro Plus brand.
- Japanese fans associate the name “Sonico” with Sony, and Nitro Plus is always going out of their way to stress that there’s no connection between the two.
- Cosplayer Jessica Nigri voiced Sonico in the anime, so we went out of our way to make sure to have her for the English release of the Super Sonico game. She stayed in my condo in San Diego while we were recording. So I get to say, “Jessica Nigri has slept in my bed.”
- When we released the game, we held a contest for Super Sonico cosplayers at Anime Expo. We thought there would be three or four of them, but more than 50 showed up. Thanks to everyone’s support, we sold more English copies of Super Sonico than Nitro Plus sold in Japan. We have the best customers!
- Why does Super Sonico always wear headphones? Sorry, I’m contractually forbidden from commenting on that.
How Did J-List and JAST USA Start Working With Nitro Plus?
The 1990s and 2000s were a rough time for Japan. The economy was terrible as the country experienced several back-to-back recessions that would come to be called Japan’s three “lost decades.” The Nikkei 225 stock average only reclaimed its 1989 peak two years ago. Can you imagine investing $10,000 in the S&P 500 and making zero return for 34 years?
While most people would think doing business during a recession would be difficult, it was actually very good for J-List and JAST. Because when the economy is humming along, Japanese companies will generally be conservative and unwilling to take risks. But when everything is crashing, they’ll be more open to, say, working with an American who wants to bring their games out in English. This is how we were able to convince Nitro Plus to let us bring their catalog to the West.
J-List and JAST had another thing going for us: the fan translation community. Obviously, no Japanese company would be down with online groups translating their games and distributing them for free on the Internet. In several cases, we were able to work with translation groups to turn these projects into official releases, after additional polishing from us. The translation groups got paid, and a proper official release of the game was made, giving royalties to the company. This also enables uncensored releases of the games. Everybody wins!
A Hard Company To Work With
But there was an extra challenge when working with a famous company like Nitro Plus: their exacting standards. We had to make sure the English versions of the visual novels we were creating were high-quality, which added months and sometimes years to our release schedule. And the nature of the original works added to the challenge. For Demonbane, for example, it wasn’t enough to just translate the text: we had to refer to the original Lovecraft stories and make sure we were faithful to them, too. That’s why it took a bit longer to get the first few games out in English than fans would have liked.
What Makes a Nitro Plus Story?
Here are some of the core elements of a classic Nitro Plus story.
- An obsession with guns and with the Mexican Standoff trope.
- Dark themes. Betrayal. Murder. They don’t call him “Urobutcher” for nothing.
- Genre mixing. It’s perfectly natural to blend romance and sex with Eldritch horrors!
- Really good music. The company goes wild ensuring the songs for their games and related anime are top-notch. Every few years they hold a huge five-hour concert where the singers perform the songs to sold-out theatres. And remember that this is a company that’s famous for making porn games.
A Sad Twist in the Super Sonico Story
If you’ve ever seen the animated film I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, you might have been surprised when a certain character is killed by a random man with a knife. This is called 通り魔 tōrima in Japanese, literally “a devil passing by on the street,” and it happens occasionally. I’m positive the novel this anime was based on was inspired by the real-life murder of Shingo Minamino, the music producer for many of Nitro Plus’s projects, including Super Sonico. Minamino and a woman who was with him were stabbed to death in 2012 by a disturbed random stranger as they walked down the street. The senseless murder shocked everyone at the company, as well as fans around Japan.
Thanks for reading this blog post about Super Sonico’s 20th anniversary and the Complete History of Nitro Plus.
Let’s Chat
You made it to the end of this post! Thank you! As a token of our appreciation, enjoy an extra 5% off your next order with code BLOG at checkout. Also, don’t forget to follow J-List on all our platforms!
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Halloween is over, but our sale is going for a few more days! Through November 3, you can get 15% off all orders shipping from Japan! That means 15% off all onaholes for male stress relief, awesome ero lotion, JAV DVDs and Blu-rays, hentai anime, and more! Browse all our sale products now!
