Pokemon devs on lack of 3DS VC games, Smash Bros., Mega Evolutions, and more
Game Informer recently caught up with Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire producer Junichi Masuda and director Shigeru Ohmori. The two were touched on slew of different topics, including the lack of Pokemon games on the 3DS Virtual Console, how Pokemon are chosen for Smash Bros. the possibility of revisiting the idea of extensions for previously-released titles, and more.
You’ll find a few excerpts from Game Informer’s interview below. Head on over here for the full discussion.
On the lack of Pokemon games for 3DS VC…
Our focus right now, as you can see with Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire being a good example, is with the older titles we like to go back and update them and kind of power them up for the new generation. A lot of the communication features we feel that are obviously core to the Pokémon series, we have to update them. So for example these titles are compatible with Pokémon X and Y, you can battle and trade between the two series of games. So right now it’s just really that the only reason is that our focus is on actually updating the games and doing remakes instead of putting out the old titles.
On how Pokemon characters get into the Smash Bros. games…
Even since the very first Smash Bros., it’s been Mr. Sakurai coming to us with ideas saying, “If we put this Pokemon in this game – in Smash Bros. – we’d be able to show it off in a really cool way and do something really cool with it.” The origin comes from Mr. Sakurai. We typically go with what he wants to do because he’s really thinking of not just showing off the character in a cool way, but making sure it makes sense and works really well from a gameplay perspective. We leave it up to him.
On how it’s decided which Pokemon will receive Mega Evolutions…
We have a real variety of methods in terms of how we pick who gets Mega Evolutions. One of the methods is to look at the battle balance. We obviously monitor how players are playing the game through tournaments like Pokémon World Championships or even just battles online for the ratings and looking at the current environment we’ll see who we should give Mega Evolutions to in order to improve the balance or counter some of the existing favorites.
Other considerations include what fans are excited for, like which Pokémon they really want to see Mega Evolutions for, so we look at that and we introduce a few that fans are really going to enjoy. Other than that, from a story a perspective, like this time with Alpha Ruby and Omega Sapphire, we kind of explore the origins of Mega Evolutions, and in that story Rayquaza is really prominently featured. We look at the story as well to see which Pokémon need Mega Evolutions there. And then it’s up to the designers to see which ones they really want to work on. So it’s a lot of considerations we have when we determine mega evolution Pokémon.
On whether or not we’ll see extensions of already released Pokemon games (like a Pokemon Grey)…
Masuda: For the Pokémon brand, and for Game Freak, our first and foremost goal and top priority with these titles is to always surprise and excite our fans. I’m not going to say we won’t ever do those things again, but we consider the timing and what would be the most surprising or exciting for fans at the time. Everyone was really expecting Grey, so it was exciting to come up with something fans really didn’t expect.
On whether Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire will have more 3D than X/Y…
I think that the coolest thing about the 3DS’ 3D implementation is that you don’t need glasses. The reason we limited the 3D in X and Y is that you can play an RPG for long hours, and we wanted to select where we used the 3D effect. One of the reasons for this is that we wanted to put as much decoration into the overworld map as possible, which takes up rendering resources that compete with the 3D vision. So in certain parts where we want to surprise players, we’ll turn on the 3D effect for special scenes or battles, and we’ll focus on rendering resources on more elaborate environments for when they’re walking around and playing long hours.
