Mario Tennis Aces devs on the game’s mechanics, story mode, how new characters were decided, name, more

Execute Devastating Moves by Saving Energy!

How exactly did you come up with mechanics like the “Zone Shot” and “Racket Breaking?”

Hiroyuki: The idea for the Zone Shot actually came first. In a real tennis match, if a lucky ball comes your way you’re likely to aim for the corner of your opponent’s court, right? That was something grounded enough in reality that we felt we could implement.

Izuno: Even up until now you had to pick the direction you wanted the ball to go in – either left or right. Now, though, you can pinpoint the ball’s exact landing spot much like a professional tennis match and can execute a more precise attack against your opponent.

Hiroyuki: We also wanted to capture the sense of competition that real-world sports have through a national tournament, or even a world tournament! We felt that if we aimed for something like that, it’d be just like pro tennis, wouldn’t it?

Shugo: What Izuno-san mentioned – instinctively aiming at the corners – is a dilemma we’d been grappling with since the days of the N64 game. For people who actually play tennis, that’s just a part of the game.

Is that so?

Shugo: In other words, if we made a game in which the player could accurately target one of the corners every single time, it’d essentially be an unbeatable strategy. So, to avoid that, up until now we basically told ourselves we couldn’t put something like that in the game. And yet, as both a game developer and a tennis player, it was something that I’ve wanted to implement for quite awhile now. With every new game we’d make, that feeling would resurface.

So, would you say that implementing that mechanic in some way was inevitable?

Izuno: Right. But then, if you aim at the edge of your opponent’s court, they won’t be able to return it, right?

According to everything you’ve told me, that seems to be the case. (laughs)

Izuno: Correct; but something like that wouldn’t hold up as a part of the gameplay, so we wondered what we’d do about it. That’s how we ended up coming up with the slow-motion “Zone Speed” mechanic – that way, players would be able to return Zone Shots. And then we got to thinking: “Why not target the characters too? Why just the corners?” That led to us thinking about what would happen if the player targeted the opponent’s racket.

Shugo (while pointing at Hiroyuki): Then one day this one comes up to me saying “I want something to happen if a player targets an opponent’s racket with a Special Shot.” (laughs)

Izuno: And so, “Racket Breaking” was born.

Shugo: I remember my first thought being: “What!? Wouldn’t that be horrible if that happened in a real match?”

Right! Hearing about the team’s fixation on realism had me wondering how “Racket Breaking” was a passable mechanic!

Shugo: Well, in a real tennis match it’s possible to injure something like your wrist or your knee, right? So, we had to think a little more about it: what would be a kind of “injury” that’d be appropriate for a game? There’s a unique set of parameters for coming up with, say, an injury; we wouldn’t want that kind of thing to happen to any of the players, right? So, we made it a little less severe – if your racket takes too much damage, it’ll break! It wasn’t too “out there” and it wasn’t too realistic. How’s that for a reason?

(all laugh)

Hiroyuki: Shugo and I were pretty adamant about wanting rackets to be breakable, but even so there was a clear opposition.

Izuno: I feel like people who actually play tennis get sort of attached to their rackets, so there was some debate. Of course, there was much discussion as to how we’d actually have the rackets break. Playing the game and seeing the mechanic in-action elicited a different response from me, though. It felt good to break the opponent’s racket – the animation itself was flashy and satisfying. Even the rest of the development team was impressed!

Hiroyuki: When it came to compatibility with the game’s rules, though, it seemed pretty absurd. I felt like winning by KO’ing the opponent was a bit too much.

Izuno: If a racket becomes damaged during an actual tennis match, it’s treated as a point, right? We felt that if a racket were going to break during a match it needed to have more impact, so we decided that the match would just end then and there.

Hiroyuki: Including that mechanic definitely changed how the game played considerably.

Izuno: It makes you want to really hit the ball!

Shugo: It just feels good to do it; on the other hand, too, though, it gives you more of an incentive to block.

Hiroyuki: Becoming an “ace” at blocking those kinds of shots is practical, too!

Exploring the Game through Unique Shots!

At one point did you decide to have Zone Shots and Special Shots consume Energy?

Izuno: Concerning the whole “Energy” concept, you could almost interpret it as the player’s adrenaline. If you keep up a good rally, and continue building up that adrenaline, you can perform some incredible moves! It feels like you do better when the audience is cheering you on, too. That’s essentially where the “Energy” concept came from: unleashing your best moves after letting your adrenaline build.

Shugo: Some people also call that “getting in the zone.” In the “zone,” you feel you can aim and hit the ball just about anywhere – that’s where the name “Zone Shot” came from. “Zone Shot” fits right into the sports lexicon, I think.

Is there a reason why the mechanic is referred to as “Sharpshooting” in the Japanese version?

Shugo: It’s just easy to understand. In America, “Technical Shots” are often known as “Trick Shots,” so naturally that translation made it into the game as well.

And those Trick Shots play a pretty important role in how you use your Energy, too.

Hiroyuki: Trick Shots and the like are actually something we’ve been grappling with since the GameCube days. It’d be pretty weird that even if you used a technique that was dubbed a “decisive blow” it wouldn’t decide the match. Yet at the same time we felt that if special shots were the deciding factor as to whether the player won or lost it’d make for pretty boring gameplay. So, we busied ourselves thinking about ways to integrate those kinds of mechanics into the game while keeping things fun for the player. If we were to include that kind of technique in the game, we decided that it would be the Trick Shot – a shot that was born out of a need to maintain a sense of balance in the gameplay. Even still, if a player could return all of their opponent’s shots using Trick Shots, they might not do anything but that.

Izuno: A player might also be tempted to use nothing but Trick Shots given because it accumulates Energy. We didn’t want that to end up being the case, so we made them a tad difficult to execute.

Shugo: A Trick Shot is something you should only attempt if you have enough leeway to do it, it’s kind of risky. If you execute it properly, you can gain a lot of Energy that might save you later on; if you’re too early, though, you can lose some Energy as well.

Ah, that makes sense; when you first mentioned it, I was thinking about how easy it would be for the player to accumulate more Energy than the Computer Player.

Izuno: Right, there was a lot of fine tuning involved in a pivotal mechanic like that.

Shugo: If there’s a mechanic in the game that makes the player think “wow, I can do something like that,” then there’s more of an incentive for the player to save up Energy!

Hiroyuki: To that end, we thought of it like this: to be a sport worth watching, the players have to make interesting plays. We thought that players could show each other their skills by performing risky techniques – the Trick Shot is that common ground between players. Special Shots were created in the same way, in that we wanted players to have a degree of control over them.

Shugo: All of these started off as ideas, so we developed them pretty independently – even Zone Shots and Trick Shots. We also had an idea for a mechanic that revolved around the crowd getting excited after the player performed a skilled play.

And now they’re all bound together by the “Energy” mechanic.

Hiroyuki: There are lots of ways to play depending on how you utilize your Energy. Of course, the player’s affinity with certain characters and various strategies also play a part in how you play the game.

Izuno: There’s no one “optimal” way to play the game.

Hiroyuki: After launch there’s no telling what kind of plays people will make, particularly those who’ve gotten even better since the demo! The online tournament that was held a while ago gave way to a lot of formidable players, and it’d be nice if one day those same players could get together for a world championship. We’ll have to wait until then to see what kind of strategies people are playing the game with!