From that interview, it sounds like the Lovecraft connection may have broken KAZe. Their producer/director picked it as a theme after Googling about Western horror stuff, because they wanted to expand their Western audience, seeing pinball as being more popular in the West–and they went big, spending as much on the Dream Theater soundtrack alone as they would have on an entire game’s production
–but from the way they talk about it in the interview it sounds like they didn’t really understand the theme, and it appears to have been a profound miscalculation as that game was NOT picked up for publication in the West, unlike Last Gladiators. Lead programmer Kunihito Hiramatsu and designer/director Takashi Kobayashi left, KAZe had just one new game out in the next two years–a licensed game–and after that it was nearly all licensed stuff; not even another try at a pinball game (and a licensed one at that) for six years.