Iwata Asks: Pandora's Tower - Details on dev issues, sympathy and true love
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- development of Pandora’s Tower originally began in late 2006
- the game took four whole years to develop
- Ganbarion was asked by Nintendo if they would like to work on an original I.P.
- Ganbarion pitched an idea to Nintendo
“I’d always wanted to make a game that would appeal to boys, from students starting secondary school to around twenty years old. So that’s why I chose to put a woman at the centre of this game. I wanted to explore something that changed, something that underwent a transformation, and I decided that it could be this woman who undergoes that transformation.” - Ganbarion’s representative director, Chikako Yamakura
- Elena is the heroine that is afflicted by a curse that is slowly mutating her
- Aeron, the protagonist, must bring her the raw meat of monsters to slow this change
- you can also give Elena gifts that will affect her mood
- you choose how often you want to return
- Elena's appearance will change depending on how many times you visit
“I settled on the idea of a woman who was pure being somehow spoiled or corrupted and then becoming pure once more.” - Ganbarion’s representative director, Chikako Yamakura
- Aeron's main weapon is the Oraclos chain
- this can be used to attack monsters, grab onto levers and so on
“We adopted actions using a chain because I was rather confident that a girl’s skin and a chain will make a beautiful contrast in the players’ eyes.” - Ganbarion’s representative director, Chikako Yamakura
- when Yamakura and another Ganbarion employee had a conversation about lunchboxes served at train stations, the idea of eating monster meat came up
- there's law in the game’s world that forbids the eating of meat
- this was inspired by the “carnivorous girls” and “herbivorous boys” a societal phenomenon
- Iwata wasn't completely sold on the idea, but the project was greenlit anyway
- this was due to the great work that Ganbarion did on the Jump titles for DS
- issues that came up during development involved how to use the Wiimote and making the player care about Elena
- testing lead to people feeling that feeding Elena was a chore, and some even liked watching her turn into a monster
- most of Elena's cut-scenes and voice work was scrapped and redone
- Elena’s character itself was redesigned for greater sympathy
- Yamakura would lock herself in her office and continually hammer away this redesign
- Yamakura lost about 10 kilos in the process
- this happened about one year prior to the game's release
- according to Nintendo producer Hitoshi Yamagami, the original pitch was given by Yamakura as, “She got a whiteboard out and told us that the theme was going to be true love.”
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