Iwata Asks: The Last Story - Volume 3 summary
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“Changing the Grammar of the Game”
- Matsumoto worked with Sakaguchi on Blue Dragon, have continued working with him for the last seven and a half years
- The Last Story’s development began as Sakaguchi came up with a planning document for the game
- Sakaguchi met with Matsumoto in Daikanyama, and the two discussed the state of video games
- The two men had similar ideas about the issues facing games
- Their focus was on the lessons they believed they had to learn from Blue Dragon
- That game wasn’t embraced by western players
- Sakaguchi and Matsumoto talked about the difference between Japanese audiences and western consumers
- They concluded that they might have chosen a relatively easy path by making too many games in the same style
- They talked about the games that were innovative at the time, and they had both been viewing the same clips on a video-sharing site
- Matsumoto and Sakaguchi were viewing footage of a particular game, and it came as a real shock
- They wondered, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
- Sakaguchi and Matsumoto vowed that they would create a new approach and would do so soon
- This led to the prototype “Tofu-kun”
- Rather than focusing on graphics, they looked at how the elements in the game would function and fit together
- About a year was spent on this prototype
- Matsumoto knew they’d have to make a new battle system and knew they would have to change the grammar of the game or else they’d endlessly repeat the same thing
- This is how they ended up making a prototype with a hero and three companions with blue blocks of tofu for their heads
- Enemies were red tofu
- Enemy leader was given a pair of red spectacles
- Tofu blocks were used for trial and error
- Could turn your attention to the leader in the prototype
- This gives the player the choice to focus their fire on him and could order their allies to prioritize this
- This was the foundation of the final battle system
- Emphasis on getting the collision detection right, including things like the player character concealing themselves in the shadows, squeezing themselves into tight gaps and alleys
- They wanted players to interact with a variety of complex and varied terrain
- Wanted objects that are typically used as background decoration to be used as interaction
- Matsumoto spent a lot of time fitting Sakaguchi’s story into the terrain of the game
- Sakaguchi developed the broad plot, and would sometimes look at the terrain and suggest events that might occur
- This was the first time Sakaguchi worked on a game where the events were intimately bounded up with the level design
- There were ideas the team put in to get attention or cause a stir which ended up being used in the final game
- Sakaguchi: “Sakaguchi: That’s right. Take the hero, Zael, for instance. He’ll always open doors by kicking them, and his companion will respond by saying: ‘There you go, kicking down doors again!’ At first, that was just a joke, but then people started saying it was a great feature. That’s why we ended up leaving it in the game as one of that character’s distinctive traits. There are a lot of elements in the game that originated with Matsumoto-san.”
- Zael has a poor sense of smell; his companions joke about how lucky he is when they encounter a really malodorous monster
- There was a process where the staff would come up with ideas and exchange opinions about what should/shouldn’t happen and this ended up combining to create the unique feel that the game world possesses
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