Thanks again (I know I responded on Twitter too, but I can use more characters in one post here); project scoping aside, I really do think that small stories about regular people are worth telling. And making the stories about kids is a great excuse to not have to put in the work to make a battle system.
The idea for this came up after I saw the most recent Star Wars mainline movie in theaters. I was thinking about how that universe has media set everywhere, telling stories of characters you'd never see in the mainline movies. It just made me sad that Suikoden's rich world doesn't have that. Sure, it did, for a short period where the series was successful enough to warrant production of the Gaidens and novels and manga and whatnot. But they didn't get very far in filling out the world! Then they kind of gave up with the million worlds, which was really disappointing.
So I decided to just start making these stories myself. This project took me about 15 months. I have the script all ready for the second game and ideas for the third and fourth games. Hopefully I can crank out one of these every 12-15 months.