Kamiya estimates 20 hours of gameplay for Wonderful 101, would be happy to see Bayonetta in Smash Bros.
The Wonderful 101 will not be a short game. Far from it, actually.
Although director Hideki Kamiya and his team at Platinum Games are striving to create a game with a lot of replay value, there is a ton of content waiting for players who only plan on experiencing The Wonderful 101 once. Kamiya estimates 20 hours of gameplay for a “normal play session”.
Basically, with action games, like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, something that we really strive for is replayability. These are types of games that you get out of what you put into them, the play quality is really important. So we estimate with some of these past games you get around maybe 10 hours of play, but it’s also the type of experience that you put in a lot of effort in designing so that you may get 10 hours of play but its the kind of experience that you can play over and over. Like, you come home from school and once you get really good at it you can start getting through the game a little bit quicker and, you know, there’s this constant sport of effort to outdo your last play sessions.
So, we do pay attention to the length. It’s something that I try to put in a lot of volume into it, but also reward players who are able to play it quicker and better, and so the experience of course in that case ends up shorter. But the focus on replayability has been something really strong, especially in Bayonetta and Wonderful 101, and even Resident Evil 2 so you could get it down to a two-hour play session.
In The case of Wonderful 101, we really try to pack a lot of different ideas into it, and it got a lot bigger than I thought. And in fact we estimate that a normal play session would be 20 hours. Personally I think that I kept piling stuff on and I realized “Wow, this is going to be a pretty big game.” But that notwithstanding, replayability is a really important factor, it has to be sort of easy to play in the sense that you don’t get tired of playing it, and you would be able to ultimately play it in a day.
Kamiya also addressed one other interesting topic: Bayonetta 2 in Smash Bros. He’s in no position to add anyone to the roster, but he’d be happy to see the character in the upcoming Wii U/3DS game.
“So it’s not something that I could comment on. In fact, you could probably ask Mr. Sakurai! If Mr. Sakurai wanted to put her in the game it probably would happen and I’d be more than happy to!”
