El Shaddai director explains why and how the Switch port happened

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron will soon be coming to Switch after its original launch more than a decade ago. In a recent interview with Famitsu, director Sawaki Takeyasu spoke about how this version of the game came to be.

Takeyasu indicated that fan requests spurred things on initially. However, if not for middleware developer Aqualead and its engine, the port may not have happened.

Here’s our translation of the discussion between Famitsu and Takeyasu:

First off, please tell us about how El Shaddai came to be ported to the Switch.

In 2021, we released the HD remaster on PC (Steam). To be honest, it sold decently well. On top of that, we heard the voices of many users saying, “There won’t be a Nintendo Switch version?”, or “I want to play this on a console”, and that was how things began.

I had been involved with game development for the Switch a little in the past, but that was when I was working in a company. Developing in a company and developing independently are completely different playing fields. We really needed to create an environment for game development for the Nintendo Switch from scratch, so we thought, “What should we do?”

How did you then reach the point of being able to port the game?

The head programmer this time, Hiroyuki Hayashibara, made enormous contributions. Porting a game made for the PlayStation 3 to modern hardware is extremely difficult, and there were many discussions on how to overcome that wall.

However, before we knew it, Hayashibara had created a compact engine called “Aqualead” that could accommodate porting old games, and so El Shaddai was already on the way (laughs). The fact that we were able to port the game is entirely thanks to Hayashibara.

To think, it had to start all the way from creating the base game engine.

When porting games from that era, there are times when people call them “inferior ports!”, but not only did this not downgrade anything, but it was also an improvement in many ways. The resolution has gone up, the game runs at 60 FPS, and the loading times are shorter too.

Because the game now runs at 60 FPS, players might find the action part of the gameplay less challenging than before. Not only is the game more responsive than before, the smoothness on screen should allow players to progress quickly.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is out today for Switch.

Translation provided by SatsumaFS, Simon Griffin, and Philip Proctor on behalf of Nintendo Everything.