I took it less as him saying he "ignored" past games and more as him saying they went rather experimental on the story and weren't afraid to step on any past continuity toes since they could just write the game out of the canon later if they wanted (if there was fan displeasure or the like).
Now that you mention it though, beingthehero, IGA may have consciously been following a similar storyline formula that SotN uses for Rondo when it comes to HoD and PoR. Even AoS and DoS sort of refer to the past events of another "game," ignoring the fact that that game doesn't exist but was probably meant to eventually. OoE is the one that kind of breaks the mold. Of course it's also possible that he felt with the timeline as packed as it was, he needed to justify closeness of the newer game to the last game in the canon.
Also, while playing as Richter in the intro may seem like a contradiction, I think he was probably thinking of disallowing playing as multiple characters more in the context of something like 50% of the game as one character, then losing that character and playing the next 50% with another one since it would cut the progression. Richter's bit in the intro doesn't even make up 1% of the game, so it is a technical contradiction but not necessarily one in spirit. The RPG elements of SotN wouldn't really work well with something like a 50-50 pr 60-40 split between characters but they work fine with a short intro stage that doesn't feature them.
Now the whip thing does seem more problematic given what he was saying.