SMT X Fire Emblem devs talk project's birth, teasing fans, development difficulties

Coming from a GamesBeat interview with Atlus producer Shinjiro Takata and Nintendo producer Hitoshi Yamagami,,,

GamesBeat: I was blown away by the initial announcement, because it was literally nothing — just a tease of what could be. Since then, everyone’s been trying to figure out how this game comes together. I’d bet you had a similar issue internally. How did this come together? What was it like trying to put major franchises like this into a single coherent production?

Shinjiro Takata: What happened was, in the process of making this game—the whole idea started when Mr. Hitoshi Yamagami, who is a producer at Nintendo, brought the idea of making a simulation, a strategy game, to Atlus. This was a problem, because Atlus is well known for making JRPGs. That’s our bailiwick. The next thing was, well, what do we do? Do we make it fantasy-based, because Fire Emblem is known for fantasy settings? That kind of fantasy game isn’t really what Atlus tends to put out, though. In the beginning phases of making this game, we really didn’t know which direction to push it in. Do we push it closer to Fire Emblem or to the modern setting of Shin Megami Tensei?

GamesBeat: The previous trailers showed very small teases of battle systems or other aspects of gameplay. Was that intentional? It got a lot of people talking, to the point where we saw frame-by-frame analysis of the trailers. It was fun to look into and explore.

Shinjiro: We weren’t paying too much attention to the response to the first trailer, but we did check out some of the Japanese YouTube comments. People were making some really strange predictions. A few of them got pretty close, though. We put a lot of Easter eggs in the trailer for people who were looking hard. You’ll see that some of the posters have tikis in them and stuff like that. On 2channel, the Japanese message board, they were looking at that and doing all kinds of analysis. It was fun to watch that.

GamesBeat: I’m guessing that a lot of approaches must have been thrown out in the process, given how hard it is to fit some things that are so different together – not only making them work, but also making fans happy.

Shinjiro: While we were worrying about all these things, Mr. Yamagami came in and said, you should make the games that you guys are known for making. Do it the way you want to make it. While we were worrying about what we’d do with the characters’ names, how we would represent the characters from the old series in this new game, basically we decided to go the simple route and make in the way that our company is known for.

Hitoshi Yamagami: When you make something new, if you’re trying to make something out of two different things, if you just choose what’s directly in between those two things, what you end up with is extremely strange. What I told him is, if you’re unsure what to do, just make you want to make. That’s why, if you look at parts of the game, there are lots of parts that really resemble the Fire Emblem series. If you look at other parts of the game, they resemble the Shin Megami Tensei series. But the game itself stands on its own as a new game.