Junko Kawano

• 1. Introduction

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  Junko Kawano walked into Konami in 1993 as a newly hired artist, and was almost immediately handed a project that would shape Japanese role-playing games for years to come. Her collaborator was another newcomer, a writer named Yoshitaka Murayama. Together they were tasked with building an RPG from nothing. The console they originally designed it for was scrapped entirely. Yet the project survived, pivoted, and became one of Konami's first games for Sony's brand-new PlayStation. That game was Suikoden. What follows is the story of how a character designer became a director, a writer, and eventually the keeper of a beloved series when the people who made it walked out the door.

• 2. Building Suikoden

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  Kawano's first assignment at Konami was to help Murayama give form to Suikoden's characters. Her role was visual from the start: a character designer and illustrator drawing the faces of a world that did not yet exist. The initial platform the team built for was an internal Konami console concept that never reached the public. When that plan collapsed, the project was reopened and repositioned as a launch-window title for Sony's PlayStation. Suikoden arrived in 1995, released for PlayStation, Saturn, and Windows. Kawano's credit on Suikoden II in 1998 took a different shape: she contributed to the ending theme, titled "La passione commuove la storia," while Murayama remained the series' driving creative voice.

• 3. Shadow of Memories

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  Rather than following Suikoden II with work on the series' third installment, Kawano built something entirely her own. She wrote, directed, and designed the adventure game Shadow of Memories, also released under the title Shadow of Destiny in North America. It came out for the PlayStation 2 in 2001 and earned generally positive reviews. Kawano also performed voice acting in the game, voicing a cat. The title was later ported to Windows, Xbox, and PSP, widening its reach across platforms. Shadow of Memories established Kawano not just as a visual contributor but as a writer and director capable of sustaining a project solo.

• 4. Taking the Helm

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  In July 2002, the Suikoden team experienced significant departures. Among those who left was Murayama himself, the creator who had been with the series since its earliest days. This happened just one month before Suikoden III reached players. Kawano stepped in to take creative control of the franchise. She wrote, produced, and designed Suikoden IV, which arrived in 2004 for the PlayStation 2. The following year she delivered the spinoff title Suikoden Tactics in 2005, again writing, producing, and designing the game herself. Plans existed for further entries in the series built for the PlayStation 3, but none of those installments were ever realized.

• 5. Nintendo DS and Beyond

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  Kawano returned to the adventure game format in 2008 with Time Hollow for the Nintendo DS, a game she wrote and designed as a successor to Shadow of Memories. Two years later she wrote and directed Zack and Ombra: The Phantom Amusement Park, also for the Nintendo DS, released in 2010. Both titles extended her range as a creator working outside the Suikoden universe. She also received a Special Thanks credit on Suikoden V in 2006, maintaining a thread of connection to the series she had helmed. During this stretch she contributed as a planner on Twinbee RPG in 1998 as well, a credit that points to the breadth of her work inside Konami's output.

• 6. Rabbit and Bear Studios

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  In 2020, Kawano co-founded Rabbit and Bear Studios alongside former Suikoden developers, including Yoshitaka Murayama, the writer she had first worked with nearly three decades earlier at Konami. The studio's purpose was direct: to build a spiritual successor to Suikoden, titled Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. Kawano served as character designer on the project, returning to the illustrative role she had held at the very beginning of her career. Hundred Heroes launched in 2024 across Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Kawano had also worked as character designer on the companion title Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, which came out in 2022.