Takahashi – why Xenoblade X’s data packs exist, wants next game “to look and feel pretty different”, more

TIME is the latest outlet to have put up an interview with Monolith Soft head Tetsuya Takahashi. Xenoblade Chronicles X’s data packs, western games, and his next project were among the topics discussed.

You can find excerpts for these interview questions below. A couple of additional topics are on TIME’s website here..

On how the Xenoblade Chronicles X data packs exist since the Wii U doesn’t let devs install games…

“Open-world games are often designed with the idea that they’ll be installed on hard-disk media, but for this game, we tuned the engine to its very limits to make it playable without installation (something which I think is pretty innovative). So there’s no problem at all if you’re walking or running around the game map, but since you can also fly through the air at high speed, we used the data packs (which are handled as additional content) to load part of the game data from storage instead of the disc, in order to make it more comfortable to play.”

On how he prefers Western games to Japanese ones…

“Except for a subset of titles, Japanese RPGs are budgeted so they’ll make a profit off sales within Japan alone. It seems to me that building the entire world of the game itself (making it open-world) is considered one must-have element for Western RPGs nowadays, but that just can’t be done in the current Japan scene. But lately, I’ve started to wonder about whether this is really just because of budgetary issues. I think this is probably due to differences in cultural tastes, but in the current situation, it’s difficult to take content created in Japan and have it accepted in the West. As a result, you can only create things scaled to make money within Japan alone, and it becomes this negative spiral.”

“Japanese tastes are unique compared to those in the West, so if you focus solely on gamers within Japan, you’ll always find yourself running into this problem. (I think this is easy to see when you notice that FPS-style games sell only around 100,000 copies or so in Japan, as opposed to 10 million worldwide.) This may be a surprise to hear, but I don’t have very much interest in “current” Japanese anime and games, and I don’t play them, either. (I do get hands-on with them for future reference, though, and I still love older games that came out 30 or so years ago.) Most of the movies, TV dramas, novels, and games I pick up are made in the West. I don’t do this deliberately; that just turned out to be the kind of thing I like. As a result, I’ve come to the realization that it’s best to try and organically make the kind of things I like, or want.”

“We’re also seeing mobile games flourish in Japan while the console market declines, but the type of audience playing mobile games in Japan now has never bought my games, not since even before mobile existed. I consider the entire world to be my main field of battle, so I don’t worry about that at all. I also think that other companies’ RPGs, those with the potential to fight it out on the world market, aren’t going to be threatened by the state of mobile within Japan. That’s the kind of thought process that led to the completion of Xenoblade Chronicles X, and I hope that people will be willing to give it a try.”

On how Monolith Soft’s next project will look and feel “pretty different from this one”…

“I tend to get bored with things pretty easily, so I’d like to keep creating things with different approaches every time. Along those lines, I’d definitely like my next project to look and feel pretty different from this one. The ‘Xeno’ name, by the way, really just exists to make it clear that these are Tetsuya Takahashi productions.”