As has been known since I first started posting here, I really like to follow the weekly or daily updates from developers in magazines and websites and indeed, I think you could say there is a demand for this information from Japanese gamers, who are little obsessed with who are developing their games.
Sometimes I think there’s some really great stuff these developers write that I’d like to share in English. So I thought I’d create this thread and update it when I found something new that I found interesting.
Now it may be quite boring for you, but in that case, you can just click back on your browser and throw a silent curse my way. (It will be deflected, because I have a +13 resistance to curse button shirt on.)
The first is by Atlus’s Kazuya Niino, who is currently the creative guidance behind Yggsdrasil Labyrinth, which will be called Etrian Odyssey in the US when it gets translated by the same company. He was previously responsible for Trauma Centre. Mr. Niino, like many of Atlus’s employees, is not a fan of Final Fantasy-style lighter battles and loves to challenge players and make them think.
His original idea for Etrian Odyssey contained more perhaps bizarre dungeon designs full of original gimmicks to solve than will be in the finished, but the man is getting enough of his creative juices out just by making a dungeon hack that is based in a huge tree instead of an actual dungeon and getting to include some of those ideas. Right now, he’s quite obsessed in designing the skills for the game and coming out under the shadow of the famous MegaTen skills at his company. In an interview with Famitsu, he gave an example of one class (he predicts nine classes in all for the final version) and its ability to use sealing attacks that block attacks generated from the head (chanting, singing, roaring, mind attacks), the arms (weapon or claws) or the feet (agility-based attacks) by attacking those parts. If an enemy’s entire body is sealed than the class gains a kind of exhilaration, thrill bonus for the success of doing so. He’s full of these little ideas to make the game tricky. (Well, I thought it was neat.)
Etrian Odyssey is also going to be based around two styles: one in which the designers wish you to be a little more focused and concentrated, like in Trauma Centre, where you draw the map and annotate so its displayed to help you explore on the top screen; the other to get your mundane goals and plans out of the way as you play lightly on the bus or fall asleep with the DS in your hands.
The game is turn-based, and currently seems to support a party of five. On to the translation of his third column:
Certainly, perhaps, not an opinion that’s often shared among some other RPG developers in the West, but I thought it an interesting way of stating an element that runs along one of my basic beliefs about the appeal of RPGs.
-Kitsune