Setting
– Developers considered different types of settings like medieval Japan (main character would be a samurai) and modern day (main character would be a high school boy)
– Team chose Scandinavian mythology instead of Greek mythology
– There was a lot of trial and error with character designs, devs did motion capture for some characters before the design was finished
– Giants took a long time to create
– Sandlot found making a natural landscape difficult since they had experience mainly with cities
– Dev team researched Scandinavian nature
– Script more than 10 cm thick when piled up
– Over an hour of cut-scenes
Gameplay
– Giants pursue you after their limbs are lost, they will crawl if their legs are lost
– Increasing the difficult changes the strength + AI of enemies
– NPCs change based on the situation (like shouting different things based on how far away enemies are
– Over 3 months of voice recording
– Nintendo requested Wi-Fi gameplay, Classic Controller/MotionPlus support, Iwata specifically asked for MotionPlus
– Initially, there were going to be only 100 weapons
The age rating
– Sandlot tried making the game less violent (by cutting down on dismemberment, for example), but believed that making the game less realistic would impact the gameplay
– To minimize the violence, you play as the protector of the people, which happens to fit the original Scandinavian mythology