Tuesday 28 May 1998
After a month, Hikaru Kurata collapsed due to dangerously high blood pressure, his body finally giving in to the relentless stress he had been carrying. The cause was clear to everyone around him — ZAGE had far exceeded Sonaya's expectations by entering the sports video game genre and completely crushing Sonaya's future title, NBA Stars 98, before it even had a chance to properly compete. The shock was not just commercial, but psychological. For the first time in years, Hikaru Kurata was forced to stop, lie still, and confront the reality he had been refusing to face. In that forced stillness, something inside him shifted, and clarity slowly began to form.
During his recovery, Hikaru was visited by several key figures. His Game Department Leader, Junpei Hoshida, spoke with him at length, not as a subordinate, but as someone deeply worried about the direction Sonaya had been taking. Those conversations were heavy, filled with uncomfortable truths about the company's stagnation, pride, and fear of falling behind. Not long after, Zaboru himself visited Hikaru in the hospital. The encounter was calm, almost unsettling in its honesty. Zaboru didn't gloat or threaten — instead, he spoke about the current state of the video game industry, the meaning of innovation, and asking that Hikaru Kurata dont give up and revealing that Zaboru is actually Sonaya fan too. That visit left Hikaru Kurata with even more to think about, forcing him to reflect deeply on Sonaya's condition and his own leadership.
As Sonaya's CEO and major shareholder, Hikaru Kurata had always maintained a complicated relationship with video games. He liked them, appreciated their potential, but he never truly loved them the way creators or players did. What Hikaru truly loved was domination — absolute control over the electronics sector — just like the rest of Sonaya's core divisions. That mindset had shaped his decisions for decades.
This way of thinking could be traced back to a time even before the dawn of ZAGE, all the way to September 1991. In the aftermath of the Atari Crash, the video game industry was widely considered dead or, at best, permanently crippled. Hikaru Kurata, however, still believed that video games were a hidden gold mine waiting to be exploited again. He could see the numbers, the long-term potential, and the cultural pull — even if the market itself looked bleak.
Unfortunately, at that critical moment, his own head engineers advised him otherwise. They insisted that the video game sector was beyond saving, that it was too risky, too unstable, and not worth Sonaya's resources. Trusting their technical authority and industry forecasts, Hikaru accepted their judgment. In doing so, Sonaya abandoned any serious attempt to revive or lead the video game industry during that period — a decision that would later become one of Hikaru Kurata's greatest regrets.
But everything changed when a seventeen-year-old upstart somehow managed to build a company from scratch. With ZAGE's debut release of the first ZEPS‑1, the rules of the industry were rewritten almost overnight. ZAGE — and Zaboru Renkonan himself — redefined how games should be designed, presented, and experienced. The video game industry was clearly reviving, its market potential once again enormous, and ZAGE stood at the very center of that revival. It was at this moment that Hikaru Kurata finally realized the gravity of his mistake. Sonaya re-entered the video game race in earnest, driven by the belief that, in the end, Sonaya would prevail. After all, Sonaya possessed immense resources, deep industry connections, and decades of manufacturing power — advantages that a young company like ZAGE seemingly lacked.
But Hikaru Kurata was painfully wrong. Zaboru Renkonan was not just talented — he was frightening. He innovated relentlessly, never content to repeat the same ideas. Profit was never his primary motivation. What he truly cared about was playing good games and creating great ones. Because of that, his titles always resonated deeply with players. Just when the audience felt satisfied, Zaboru would deliver something entirely new — a fresh genre, a bold design philosophy, or a completely different approach to what a video game could be Not to mention Zaboru's charm. He was genuinely loved by gamers for his antics and openness, because he never tried to hide who he was. Despite being a company owner and game developer, he always stated clearly that he was a gamer at heart. He never acted like a typical businessman — by corporate standards, he was outright strange — but that authenticity was exactly what made players love him. From Sonaya's perspective, it was endlessly frustrating. No matter how fast they moved, they were always reacting, always following behind Zaboru Renkonan's lead.
Over the years, Sonaya continuously tried to catch up to ZAGE, and Hikaru Kurata did not shy away from using underhanded methods in the process. False rumors were spread quietly through industry channels, spies were planted to gather information, and deliberate efforts were made to damage ZAGE's public image. Sonaya even resorted to bad‑mouthing ZAGE whenever the company delayed announcing a new console.either in forum or by rumour All of this culminated in what later became infamously known as the "I'm Your Nightmare Come to Life" incident.
During that incident, Zaboru appeared directly at a Sonaya event, completely uninvited yet impossible to ignore. He calmly brought the song Nightmare with him as a statement — and what made it even worse for Sonaya was the fact that it was a full metal track, powerful, aggressive, and surprisingly well‑crafted. The song wasn't outsourced or symbolic; it was something Zaboru himself had created. As the music played, it set the tone for what followed, sending a clear message that this was not just a corporate response, but a declaration.
In front of a stunned audience — Hikaru Kurata himself, Sonaya executives, industry partners, and the press — Zaboru proceeded to reveal the full specifications and pricing of the ZEPS‑3. There was no exaggeration, no dramatic flourish. He simply laid out the facts. And those facts were devastating. ZEPS‑3 wasn't just slightly better than the Sonaya Game Station 32 bit console — it was overwhelmingly more powerful with 64 bit , technologically superior in nearly every category, and to make matters worse, it was significantly cheaper.
Overnight, Sonaya's console became the subject of ridicule. Analysts mocked it, forums dissected it mercilessly, and comparisons spread like wildfire across the internet. What had once been positioned as Sonaya's answer to ZAGE was now treated as a punchline, both technologically and commercially.
The community fallout only made things worse. Whenever Sonaya fans appeared around ZAGE fans, they were immediately drowned out by boasting and ridicule. It soon became obvious that many of the loud voices that had previously booed ZAGE weren't genuine fans at all — they were paid agents planted by Sonaya to spread negativity. When that truth came to light, the situation collapsed entirely. The small number of real Sonaya fans felt ashamed of their own community, disillusioned by the manipulation, and many of them quietly shifted their support elsewhere altogether.
From that moment on, Sonaya's situation began to spiral downhill. While the video game department did not immediately cause direct financial losses for the company as a whole, it failed to generate meaningful profits. This failure placed Hikaru Kurata under constant pressure from other shareholders, many of whom openly demanded that the video game division be shut down entirely. Despite that pressure, Hikaru Kurata refused. As a major shareholder, he understood Sonaya's core motto better than anyone — Sonaya never gives up, even when the odds are stacked against it.
Hikaru Kurata spent countless nights thinking through every possible solution. Strategy after strategy ran through his mind, most of them aggressive, some desperate. It was Junpei Hoshida — his most trusted man and head of the Game Department — who finally grounded the discussion. Junpei argued that Sonaya should focus on sports games, pointing out that at the time ZAGE had not released any major sports titles for a while. It was a rare opening, a chance to establish dominance in a genre before ZAGE inevitably returned.
Junpei also strongly emphasized one thing: Sonaya should stop antagonizing ZAGE. He warned that provoking Zaboru only led to disaster, not victory. Yet Hikaru Kurata's pride would not allow him to fully accept that advice. The resentment he had built up over years of playing catch‑up surfaced once again. Instead of restraint, he chose defiance. Refusing to let the matter slide, Hikaru approved an aggressive advertising campaign for Sonaya's football game, boldly declaring the slogan: "We Do It First." It was meant as a statement of intent — and a thinly veiled insult aimed directly at ZAGE.
Then came the most recent incident — the final blow that pushed Hikaru Kurata past his limits. ZAGE released NBA Live 98, and they did so with a slogan that felt deliberately cruel in its timing: "We Do It Better." The message was unmistakable. ZAGE was not only re‑entering the sports genre, they were reclaiming it entirely. In a single release, every remaining plan Sonaya had carefully prepared for its sports division collapsed. The current game plan, marketing strategies, and internal confidence were rendered meaningless almost overnight.
After that incident, something finally changed inside Hikaru Kurata. Lying in recovery, stripped of denial and pride, he gained a rare moment of clarity. For the first time, he truly accepted that being number two was not failure. He began to understand that carefully analyzing ZAGE's games — not as enemies, but as direction and reference — was not weakness. He realized Sonaya did not need to chase ZAGE by releasing multiple games at once like them, because its burning resources and morale in the process they arent ZAGE after all.
With that new perspective, Hikaru Kurata moved quickly. He initiated sweeping changes within the Game Department, restructuring teams, adjusting priorities, and encouraging a healthier development pace. Several risky but necessary adjustments were made, and for the first time in years, the atmosphere inside Sonaya's game division began to shift. Fortune even seemed to turn in their favor — new talent started to arrive, developers with fresh ideas and genuine passion, the kind of people that even Zaboru himself would have been delighted to recruit into ZAGE.
And now Hikaru Kurata is meeting with his Video game department.
To be continue
AN : I really love writing Sonaya and Hikaru Kurata stories and he's been stubborn all these years and time for character development lol.
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