Iwata Asks: Kid Icarus: Uprising (part 2) – Game began development on PC/Wii

Nintendo has published the second (and possibly final) edition of the Iwata Asks: Kid Icarus: Uprising interview. Although it’s a bit shorter than most Iwata Asks, it does contain a few interesting tidbits.

For instance, did you know that Kid Icarus: Uprising was being developed on the PC and Wii? This was because Project Sora didn’t have access to 3DS development kits initially.

You can read about that – and more – in the detailed summary below. Before proceeding, be aware that there are a few small, nonspecific spoilers in the “After the Medusa Battle” section!

After the Medusa Battle

– Project Sora made more content for after the Medusa battle
– Sakura feels that what happens after this is more interesting
– That’s because “it’s more fun to enter the world of Kid Icarus without knowing anything ahead of time”
– Sakurai doesn’t want to give an exact number on the length of single-player, but they “packed in quite a lot so it’s highly concentrated”
– One theme of the project was to not just have a plain structure of Medusa vs. Palutena
– There are multiple armies led by gods
– Each faction has its own claims/way of thinking and moving toward different goals
– The world itself gets chaotic as you progress
– The cause of this lies with Palutena
– Sakurai: “Yeah. (laughs) If you want to know more, you have to play the game! This time, I didn’t write a script with enemies and allies entangled because I wanted to create a real sob story or increase the number of enemies. Shooting games are by nature all about defeating enemies. By showing the enemies’ intentions to target each other and their motivations behind their actions, I wanted to avoid having the flow of the game become a chore of taking out targets one by one. I think this idea is very much in line with the original concept of air battles.”
– Sakurai says “it isn’t usually my policy to put in a story within a game.”
– Sakurai tends to focus on other elements rather than a story
– Usually the main character doesn’t speak in his games
– There’s lots of talk in this game because after looking at the lineup of games for the 3DS, Sakurai thought he should create something with a story in which the main character talked quite a bit
– Sakurai wrote the whole script himself
– Sakurai payed attention to the changing situations of players over telling a story
– For each chapter, the staff tried to create the biggest changes possible in atmosphere
– Sakurai developed different dialogue so when players play a new chapter, they can slide right into the game world even if they found themselves in a situation they hadn’t experienced before
– Sakurai wanted to avoid cinematics to explain the situation as much as possible
– Sakurai says a story cinematic could ruin the tempo of gameplay if it runs too long or you make the players read the story
– No briefings before starting a chapter
– Pit is given directions as he’s thrown into battle
– Palutena explains things and is useful for tactics
– There’s a ton of conversation in the game
– Palutena chosen to be Pit’s interlocutor because Sakurai believed ” it would be great to have an incredibly serious and imperious goddess who’s close to Pit supporting and offering him words of advise.”
– They thought about placing a mascot-like character by Pit’s side, but abandoned the idea
– Sakurai wondered if he couldn’t dig into the subject about what you think is right may not necessarily be good
– Palutena being a goddess means she can intermediate with enemies and allies through telepathy

All the AR Idol Cards

– Software randomly provides six AR Idols
– Since there are a lot of cards, Nintendo is trying to make them available in different ways
– Sakurai says there are “more than XXX” cards
– He wants to keep the exact number secret
– Super Smash Bros. lets you view characters in 3D as trophies, so they wanted to make something similar for Kid Icarus
– When thinking about how to draw out all the features of the 3DS, the team learned about AR
– They wondered if they could use AR in Kid Icarus
– The staff believed a lot could be possible by simply combining the Idols/AR Cards
– There were technological hurdles in accurate recognition
– AR Card tech in the 3DS doesn’t perform the best at recognizing lots of different varieties
– Nintendo’s priority isn’t to have lots of different types of cards
– Sakurai: “It wouldn’t be possible to recognize this many cards with the same technology. We wanted to include pictures of the various characters. So we have it recognize the card screens at a resolution of about 4 by 4 and read a colorbit, while also showing the picture clearly.”
– Colorbit: pattern at the bottom left-hand size of the card
– Engineering staff worked hard on the colorbit
– Sakurai says it’s not enough to just take a picture of the AR Card with the 3DS camera and look at the character in 3D
– Sakurai wondered if they could make something new and make it so cards could fight each other
– There’s an arrow at the bottom of each card
– If two cards have their arrows face each other, their parameters for attack strength, speed, etc. appear on the touch screen
– Press a button and they’ll fight
– They’ll fight until a winner is determined
– Rock-paper-scissors determination
– If the same cards fight, it’s a tie
– Fast cards attack a bunch in a short time, though they might have low HP or attack strength
– Sword/shield/magic have rock-paper-scissors element as well
– Shields are strong against swords, weak against magic
– Sakurai: “Right. We could have made any kind of complicated card game we wanted, but we didn’t make it complicated on purpose so it would be easy to pick up and play. This makes it easier for players to devise their own rules to play. For example, two friends can face off, each with five cards, and put them out like ‘Ready…set…'”

Battle Someone At Least Once

– Sakurai doesn’t like to tell fans to check out one single feature
– Sakurai’s message to fans: “I think many different players enjoying it in many different ways would be the best of all.”
– This has been a common theme in his game development
– Sakurai thinks players will come up with a variety of different tactics for playing Uprising
– Sakurai hopes single-player gamers will try battles at least once so the can see a difference
– Winning/losing isn’t important, but the more you experience matches, the more you’ll see
– Development lasted a long time
– Since the team didn’t have the 3DS development kit initially, they started making the game on a PC
– They also used the Wii for awhile to make it
– Sakurai wrote a project proposal and the script immediately
– They made videos of prototype air/land battles even when Project Sora wasn’t up and running yet
– These were made so that when new staff joined, they can get on the same page easily by saying “Let’s make something like this!”
– Sakurai: “Right. As you can see, what we made doesn’t differ much from the overall image of the final version. There wasn’t any deviation in policy from the beginning of the project, but in order to apply it to the Nintendo 3DS and maximize its performance, we had to work hard.”
– Iwata: “Because you started developing the game so early on, getting it to run really well on Nintendo 3DS took much longer than what we originally anticipated. But now that the game is finished, I feel the efforts were well worth it. Good job working on it for so long. I’m glad we could talk about so much today.”

You can read the entire Iwata Asks here.