"We've been here for three generations, " says Tomohiro Ikeda, whose circuit-board company has gone from employing 18 workers 20 years ago to just two today.
As we find out in issue 249, the answers to these questions are in the hands of game directors new to the Souls series, Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, who have taken the reins from Hidetaka Miyazaki.
This stirred a deeply (well, not that deeply) buried memory in the hive mind that is Engadget, and we hunted down a Sony ad that's run on Japanese TV recently, which shows popular magician Tomohiro Maeda messing with a couple of PSPs and demonstrating playing a networked game on them with a UMD inserted into only one.