Bayonetta 3 devs explain why the game took so long to make

The developers of Bayonetta 3 have opened up about the making of the game, and have discussed why the project took so long to wrap up.

PlatinumGames supervising director Hideki Kamiya, producer Yuji Nakao, director Yusuke Miyata, and Nintendo producer Makoto Okazaki spoke about this in a recent issue of Famitsu. The two indicated that things didn’t exactly go according to plan, but this was more due to the amount of content the team wanted to add. Nakao said it was never about being stuck.

Below is our translation of the interview excerpt:

Did development proceed as smoothly as planned?

Okazaki: All according to plan… Not really (bitter laugh). But in terms of content, thanks to PlatinumGames, I think both the volume and the quality of the things we were able to put in was greater than expected.

Nakao: We definitely didn’t proceed completely according to a planned schedule. That being said, we were never stuck because we couldn’t figure out what we wanted the gameplay to be like, but because we kept wanting to add this aspect and that gameplay mechanic, adding in all the extra things made us go behind schedule. That’s why I felt that our schedule didn’t crumble in a negative way, but rather we went behind schedule positively.

Kamiya: There wasn’t a time when production stalled, or that things we made became useless.

Miyata: When Kamiya-san and the others asked “Aren’t you making too much stuff?”, we just blew it off with “We’re not!” and kept cramming things in (laughs).

Since you created a lot, that naturally took a lot of time. So, specifically, in which parts did you think “Let’s add more”?

Kamiya: For example with Demon Slaves, at first we thought that we needed at least five for basic gameplay, then maybe end up with six or seven for variety’s sake. But Miyao said, “We need at least ten!”, and wouldn’t give in. And forget about ten, there ended up being even more Demons that you could summon. But when I said, “Since there’s so many already, why not,” and asked to add Demons I really wanted in the game, Miyao never added them…

Miyao: (laughs) To explain this seriously, by the second game, there have been about twenty Demons. I did want to put all of them in, but of course that wasn’t realistic. The problem is, while there were certainly Demons that fans had attachment to, and we wanted to add as many of them as possible, not having new Demons would give a lonely feeling. Trying to balance these things, I decided that there needed to be at least that many Demons in the game. …With that context, the Demons that Kamiya wanted to add were all from the first Bayonetta. Since we also had Demons from Bayonetta 2, we had to maintain the balance, so I wasn’t just ignoring Kamiya-san’s requests.

Kamiya: Since I was the director for the first game, I had a strong emotional attachment to those Demons. I showed a lot of favoritism (laughs).

The developers of Bayonetta 3 also recently spoke about how the game came to be, with Kamiya saying he’s “forever indebted to Nintendo.” You can read more about that here.

Translation provided by SatsumaFS on behalf of Nintendo Everything.