Digimon Staff Profile: Totsuka Kuniaki

Profile

Name: Totsuka Kuniaki (兎塚クニアキ)

History of Activity: December 2012~Present Day

General History: Totsuka Kuniaki is an active Buddhist monk, novelist, filmmaker, video creator, and scenario/scriptwriter. After joining Bandai in 2012 to help produce Digimon texts, he started to develop his skills as not just a character writer, but especially in lore and worldbuilding, helping him specialize in those fields.

In 2015 he became in charge of the production and planning of Event Scenarios for the mobile game “Electro Girl of the Battlefield”. In 2019 he helped Matsuri Seishirou create the manga “Golden Bose”, he was in charge of supervising the Buddhist elements of the book since the main character has to disguise himself as a Buddhist monk to escape the Yakuza and find a lost treasure. In 2020 he was put in charge of creating the world and plot of the Bandai Candy series “Anima Gear”, eventually he would also start writing the Web Novel and manga of the series starting with Episode 22.

Besides his writing skills, he is known for his artwork and video editing. In 2012 he produced the PV for the mobile game “Mecha Girls War Z” by GREE. In 2018 he produced the OP and ED for the LINE Game “kotoro_”. While working on “Anima Gear” he was also in charge of video producing, making the Opening, commercials, and music videos.

These skills would then become a part of his work with V-Tubers. He mostly produces the V-Tuber “Totsuka Namu”, but he is also seen often producing for other V-Tubers making illustrations and video editing.

Digimon History: The early 2010s was a very experimental time for Digimon, especially after the short-lived Digimon Xros Wars project. Following the lack of sales success Bandai started to develop more projects focusing on old fans, mainly developing new works that allowed the fans to add various species of Digimon to Digital collections with a very simple gameplay element connected to it. This started with the NetCarddass Project “Digimon Jintrix” which, although had a physical game element, was mainly a virtual simulator with community elements.

Although it started with “Jintrix”, many other Social Games were released with Digimon’s theme, such as Digimon Collectors, Digimon Fortune, and Digimon Crusader. The amount of content was too much for the in-house team to develop, which resulted in many outsiders being hired to reduce the stress on the main theme, this was mainly in the form of artists who were hired to draw Digimon on their own styles.

The story of the Social Games was very simple, being composed mostly of limited-time events focusing on a particular Digimon that would either develop from the lore of the official profile or make reference to other media, especially the anime. However, there were some multi-part stories and main stories for certain games, like Digimon Collector’s “Tower of the Seven Deadly Sins” or Digimon Fortune’s “Fortune Code Mystery”.

According to Totsuka’s portfolio, he wrote 4 to 6 events for Social Games monthly, each with 4000 to 6000 characters, and was also in charge of making their lore and worldbuilding. Sadly, due to confidentiality agreements, he can’t specify what exactly he did, but considering the amount and rate of produced content, it’s safe to assume he did help in the making of most if not all, social games in the stated time frame.

The overcrowded era of Social Games lasted from 2012 until 2014, but Totsuka’s work wasn’t limited to working in the scenario of the Social Games, as he states he also wrote the profile for over 100 Digimon and related texts, including the flavor text for Data Carddass.

In 2017 “Digital Monster ART BOOK Ver.1～5&20th” was released by Premium Bandai and Totsuka revealed he was in charge of both collecting previous lore and creating new lore for the Digimon Ecology section of the book, resulting in what he called the best collection that connects the “past” and the “present”. Although he had worked in Digimon for 6 years already, he notes that was the first time he was actually credited for his work.

He continued working with the lore and worldbuilding with “Digital Monster ART BOOK Ver.PENDULUM”. A special event happened in which he asked fans on Twitter for any information regarding “Cool Boy”, a character he heard from fans who said he had appeared in the “Starter Ver.9” of the Old Digimon Card Game alongside Omegamon. He stated he finally understood who Cool Boy was thanks to their help, although Cool Boy wasn’t added in the Pendulum X summary that was added to the art book (In reality, Cool Boy wasn’t used in Chronicle as planned and instead became a character who only appeared in the booklet for Starter Ver.10 as the evangelist of the Card Game, helping new players understand how to play the Digimon Card Game).

Later with “Digital Monster ART BOOK Ver.X” he was in charge of writing the “Novel of X”, an alternate telling of the events of “Digimon Chronicle X” focusing on Jesmon’s point of view. From his tweets, we know he was also related to Digimon Pendulum Z, Digimon Journal, Digital Monster 25th Anniversary Exhibition ~Digimon Museum~ (He was in charge of the text and the audio descriptions of the event), Digimon Partner’s 15/45 Seconds Digimon Analyzers (He is also the one in charge of narrating the video), and more recently, Digimon Liberator. It’s likely he also worked with “Digimon Seekers” and “Digimon profile”, although I can’t find a Tweet with that information because of the lack of access to old tweets.

Totsuka’s work on “Digimon Liberator” is very similar to how he described his previous work with “Anima Gear”, specifying he was in charge of the worldview and character settings, design of the Tamers, scriptwriting and naming of the webcomic, and also the writing of the Web Novel and the Collums.

Totsuka Kuniaki has been working with the Digimon brand for more than one decade and although most of his work is left uncredited, it’s undeniable the impact he made on the franchise, a very important case of a fan turned into Digimon staff.