– You can turn off “perma death” (there was no option in previous games, can’t ever bring back characters that die in battle)
– Director Kouhei Maeda feels the perma death feature gives the series its uniqueness, more emotionally attached to the characters, heightens tension
– Maeda said he’d reset the game when he didn’t want to lose a character
– Game development started while the team was also working on Shadow Dragon
– Wanted to do a remake quickly so that players can see what happens next
– There was an initial concern that players who didn’t play Shadow Dragon wouldn’t want to play this game
– Instead decided to make a “completely new” Fire Emblem, though Maeda said it is based off Mystery of the Emblem
– Has completely new elements
– Intelligent Systems had constant meetings with Nintendo throughout development
– One issue: How to open up the game for beginners
– Perma death feature brought up much debate – Nintendo felt that fallen allies return, but for the next map, while project manager Masahiro Higuchi agreed with Maeda’s beliefs and wanted to keep the full feature intact
– Heated dialogues over the perma death feature, series producer Tohru Narihiro remembered them happening daily and sometimes lasting late into the night
– Debate also happened with the Shadow Dragon remake, and other Fire Emblem games, revival system was in place but removed before release
– Design document for Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu in 1996 had “You can die up to five times” in it, and Higuchi protested this to the director
– Originally Higuchi felt the perma death feature couldn’t be negotiated
– Eventually decided that beginners might be put off after hearing that your allies could be permanently killed and they might not know about resetting the game to get the character back
– At first, the team tried making one of the difficulty modes in a way so that allies would come back for the next fight
– Thought advanced players would want to play on the harder difficulty but keep allies, so the feature was untied from the difficulty settings
– “Classic Mode” for perma death, “Casual Mode” for no perma death
– Took about four months to decide on the issue
– Time flows even when the game is off
– Characters go on their own to search for items, build experience
– See which items your characters found by visiting the pre battle prep screen
Thanks to Thomas N for the tip!
1. [WII] New Super Mario Bros. Wii – 1,401,895 / 3,887,045
2. [NDS] Dragon Quest VI – 1,293,916
3. [NDS] Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 2 – 1,194,584
4. [NDS] Tomodachi Collection – 1,012,437 / 3,324,385
5. [PSP] Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep – 728,286
6. [PSP] Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker – 727,823
7. [WII] Wii Fit Plus – 695,295 / 1,993,828
8. [WII] Super Mario Galaxy 2 – 613,290
9. [PSP] God Eater – 605,316
10. [PS3] Yakuza 4 – 552,531
We’ve just confirmed that Sengoku BASARA: Samurai Heroes will launch in North America on October 12, 2010 for PlayStation 3 and Wii.
From the producer of Devil May Cry 4, Hiroyuki Kobayashi, Sengoku BASARA: Samurai Heroes finds players picking up the arms of more than a dozen samurai heroes each with their own unique weapons and battle styles. Players take on hundreds of worthy opponents and combat fantastic bosses across numerous battlefields in a quest to rule all of 16th century Japan. Utilizing upgradeable weapons, masterful special moves and deadly BASARA arts, players leave their mark re-writing Japanese history in blood.
Capcom has also confirmed that the game will launch in Europe on October 15.
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NBGI
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SQEX
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Konami
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Sega
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Atlus
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SNK Playmore
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– Original Atari Favorite Re-Imagined for a New Generation; Scares its Way to Wii, Xbox LIVE and Windows PC Download in Time for Halloween 2010 –
New York, NY – July 14, 2010 – Enter the Haunted House, if you dare. Atari’s classic groundbreaking game has returned with more chills, cool new unlockables and plenty of spooky new enemies. The terrifying fun that lies within Graves Mansion is back as Atari, one of the world’s most recognized publishers and producers of interactive entertainment, scares up its legendary classic, Haunted House — re-imagined for a new generation of gamers in celebration of the title’s 30th anniversary. Haunted House will take control of Wii®, Xbox LIVE® Arcade for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, and Windows PC Download this fall, with suspense filled challenges, new chilling environments and more frightful enemies than ever before.
Haunted House pays homage to the classic favorite as players fight for their lives in Graves Mansion as the grandchildren of the original character that disappeared without a trace in the evil mansion over 30 years ago. Chased by pesky poltergeists, haunted by scary skeletons and exhausted from battles with creepy creatures, players are in a goosebump-educing fight to explore the dark and creepy depths of Graves Mansion in search of the four lost pieces of the magical urn. The player’s goal is to reassemble the urn and defend their family’s legacy with the aid of mystical tomes, powerful light sources and multiple keys.
– Bombs making a return
– Once you leave Kamiki Village, you head out into Shinshu Field to meet up with Tama again
– Tama is ill, but you can’t get medicine from the local medicine man since his house has been taken over by demons
– You’ll later need to visit Onibi Market (a demon-only market)
– In order to get in, you have to draw a demon head for yourself on a piece of paper to wear
– Sakurai was trying to figure out what sort of game he should make in 2008
– Sakurai believed that a lot of ports would be made, and didn’t think Iwata would want something that’s already been seen, is small, or is something like Wii Party
– Ultimately he decided to go with a difficult genre and something he wouldn’t usually do
– He chose the shooter genre, which isn’t very popular in Japan
– Made his decision because he felt it would be a good match for the 3D graphics
– Sakurai quickly made a basic design
– Project plan formally announced in 2008 after talking with Nintendo and interviewing potential studio members numerous times
– At this point it wasn’t Kid Icarus, just an original franchise
– Sakurai had asked Iwata in his first conversation if he should stick with a Nintendo franchise, Iwata told him that they should think about it if his project would be a good fit for one of the company’s franchises
– After that, Sakurai revised his project plan, and Kid Icarus came to mind since it’s popular in the West
– Initially was presented as an original game, but later Sakurai suggested to make it Kid Icarus
– As work on the game started, Sakurai rented a small office space in the Takadanobaba district of Tokyo in November 2008
– Only had a few staff members
– No development tools at the start since the 3DS was brand new
– Sakurai wanted to settle on their direction so that things could go smoothly when the staff moved to a bigger office
– He finalized Uprising’s project plan and wrote the story in the first office
– Project Sora started recruiting staff in March 2009
Quotes from Sakurai:
“Most of the games due to come out during the launch window were probably going to be ports. I could have chosen a genre that was easy to develop, but I doubted Iwata wanted something everyone’s seen before, or something small, or something like Wii Party. In the end I deliberately choose a difficult genre, something I wouldn’t usually work with.”
“That’s frankly not a major genre in Japan (shooter), although overseas there are piles of masterpieces in that field. You can’t argue that the marketplace for it [in Japan] is very healthy.”
“I wanted the game flow to involve traveling to enemy territory in the air, then fighting bosses on the ground. The air battles would be done 3D shooter-style and be as simple and exciting as possible, like a roller coaster or some similar ride. It’d be something close to a rail shooter, although you can move Pit around independently. It’d be difficult to make a whole game around that, though, and I didn’t think gamers would be happy with it — that’s where the ground battles come in.”
“During that first conversation with Iwata, I asked him whether I had to stick with a Nintendo franchise for this project. Working on Smash Brothers, I knew all about how much love gamers had for all of Nintendo’s games, and how frustrated they were that some of the series have lain dormant for so long. Any game designer wants to concentrate on original work, but given the role Nintendo had for me, I wanted to know if they had a particular brand they wanted to emphasize.”
“When I presented my project to Nintendo, it was as a wholly original game, but in the end I suggested that we make it a Kid Icarus title instead. I’d have the goddess Palutena grant Pit the power of flight for five minutes at a time, and he’d fly into enemy strongholds and fight enemies on the ground afterwards. It sounded like a ton of fun, I thought, and I got the go-ahead pretty soon afterward.”
“I kicked off the project with a staff that I could count with my fingers. The window glass was razor-thin and wind drafts leaked through them. Since the 3DS was brand-new hardware, there were zero development tools, and even if there were, Nintendo would never let them outside of headquarters. So my chief goal was to settle upon our direction and make things go as smoothly as possible once we started to ramp up staff and move to a bigger office.”
“I’m not the sort of person who wants to tell a story with his games. A game’s scenario acts as a series of signposts to move the player from one situation to the next, giving him a goal to strive for. The dev team needed the design framework so they could start working on stages, so I finished up the story right after the basic project design was done. Based on that, I hired several outside illustrators to come up with concepts for the backgrounds and characters.”
“We’ve gone through a variety of twists and turns in the ensuing year before the E3 announcement,” he said. “FPSes and third-person shooters are an intensely competitive genre to work with; it puts us at a disadvantage from the start, and there’s no way we could outclass the hi-definition visuals of console games on a portable. Nonetheless, I thought that project would be a vital test case to see if we could make a fun, playable, fully-3D game. It’s the first 3DS project ever launched — simple but technically complex, easily learned but deep enough to satisfy gamers. We’re interweaving a variety of conflicting watchwords into the game as development continues.”
“The basis we have now is very, very solid. Early 2011 – that is what we’re aiming for.” – Eiji Aonuma
This isn’t anything too different than what we heard coming out of E3, but it’s nice to see another confirmation that we’ll be able to play the game early next year. If I had to guess, I’d say Skyward Sword will launch sometime between February and April.
