During an interview producer Junzo Hosoi discussed the upcoming RPG Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout, as well as his surprise that everyone found the lead character so sexy.

For those unfamiliar, main character Reisalin “Ryza” Stout seemed to have captured the interest of many fans, due to her thick thighs and tight boots and pants. This creates a “skin dentation” effect, something that has grown popular in anime in recent years to show how thick a character’s chest, buttox, or thighs are.

The game’s character designer Toridamono certainly knew what he was doing. As stated in a then leaked copy of Dengeki PlayStation, Hosoi commented “Toridamono was very focused on getting Ryza’s thighs just right. There staff on the Gust side of development that also followed his lead (laughs).” 

Nonetheless, Hosoi seems surprised how appealing fans found Ryza. In an interview with Nintendo Everything, he discussed the design process behind Ryza’s design.

“In this case, the setting is that she’s a farmer’s daughter, but then we thought, “Well a skirt and farming – that doesn’t go well together.” We don’t really want their underwear showing as well. So we decided to go with the short-shorts. The other aspect is that because it’s summer – that’s the theme – so that’s how we came up with the design.

So surprisingly a lot of people are paying attention to her thighs. We didn’t create her with the intention of her thighs being the key point, but a lot of people seem to be really… (Laughs)

Our approach was to make a cute character without any sexual innuendo whatsoever. Everyone sort of looks at her as sort of being sexy, and that’s completely not how we look at her, so that really caught us by surprise. (Laughs)”

Having said that, Ryza’s “Summer Adventure” DLC costume seems to have been based heavily of her default costume, and certain elements fans liked.

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout is coming west on October 29th in North America, and on November 1st in Europe across Windows PC (via Steam), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4.