Level-5 CEO on The Snack World, Lady Layton, Megaton Musashi, Inazuma Eleven Ares

In a recent issue of Famitsu, the magazine had a massive interview with Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino. The discussion covered the company’s Level-5 Vision 2016 event, plus specific games: The Snack World, Lady Layton, Megaton Musashi, and Inazuma Eleven Ares.

It starts out with Famitsu talking about how there’s a theme each time a Level-5 Vision is held. This time around, it’s “New Heroes”. Hino notes that it’s probably just the company’s usual practice of deciding themes and holding announcement events.

After each Level-5 Vision, they’re always thinking about the period and theme for the next event as a target. Since it’s just a target, it may deviate a bit from that. The key takeaway is that Hino, along with the rest of Level-5, have prepared Level-5 Vision from awhile back. For this event, by the time 2015’s “The Beginning” ended, Level-5 decided at a very early stage that the next event should be held with the theme “New Heroes”.

Hino sometimes gets puzzled about deciding on title announcements, but this time around, he made up his mind right away. In what was revealed, Level-5 brought a brand new title and a protagonist switch to the table, so going with “New Heroes” made sense.

The Snack World

Moving on to specific games, one section goes over The Snack World, but not in too much depth. Famitsu asks about the battle system, to which Hino says in a sense it might be close to Fantasy Life. There are strong action features, but also command inputs.

Jaras are a big part of The Snack World. These are real-world items that can be scanned by the 3DS through NFC to unlock the same items in the game itself. Hino says that players can prepare a set of Jaras they’d like to use from their possession, and switch between them frequently in battle.

Chap is the protagonist of The Snack World, and you will be controlling the character at all times for the most part. However, Hino is also interested in a mode where players can create an avatar and play as that. The Snack World is a kind of online game, so he wants to let players have fun for a long time with avatars.

Lady Layton

Lady Layton is another big game covered in the interview. First, Famitsu asks about Kat’s way of solving mysteries. According to Hino, her type of reasoning is strange, yet manages to hit the spot. Even though she may look like a natural airhead, she has a calculating personality, and an orderly way of reasoning.

Famitsu also asks who Kat’s mother is. But unfortunately, Hino wouldn’t divulge anything. That mystery is a part of the story.

There’s also talk about the story composition, which we heard about before. The plot completes in each chapter, as it’s chapter-based composition. You can think of the game like a composition of a television series.

This time, Hino would like to develop episodes based on everyday life. By making it into a shape where players keep solving small mysteries in everyday life, they should be able to play it at ease, and also can feel empathy.

Another aspect we heard about before is going with a female protagonist. As previously mentioned, half of Layton’s user base is female, so it was thought that a female protagonist here would be possible, and decided that way.