If you’re a fan of visual novels, you’re very likely familiar with Mages, and today the company announced a big change at its helm.
The former President and CEO of the Tokyo-based company, Kengo Honjo, has retired from his position alongside Directors Michiko Koyanagi and Yoshiaki Harai.
The new President and CEO is Makoto Asada, whom visual novel enthusiasts are likely to be very familiar with.
Asada-san is a veteran of the industry known for his work on many visual novels (including the recent ones dedicated to The Quintessential Quintuplets, Anonymous;Code, Memories Off: Innocent Fille, Corpse Party: Blood Drive, and more) but also on well-known bullet hell shoot ’em up like Akai Katana, the DoDonPachi series, the DeathSmiles series, and Espgaluda II, including during his tenure as Cave.
Hirotaka Kawai, Yoichi Ikeda, and Kazunobu Takita form the new Directorial board.
It’ll be interesting to see what the new leadership means for the future of Mages, which has brought quite a few unexpected visual novels to the English-speaking market lately thanks to a partnership with publisher Spike Chunsoft.
Mages was acquired by Colopl in 2020 from Chiyomaru Studio and is known among others for the Science Adventure series including Steins;Gate, which is getting a reboot this year.
Recently, it also announced that Never 7: The End of Infinity and Ever 17: The Out of Infinity by Kotaro Uchikoshi are getting remasters, and has been working on licensed stories from popular anime, like the aforementioned Quintessential Quintuplet series and Rent-A-Girlfriend.
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you may know it with its previous denomination, 5pb.
