Sakamoto discusses Metroid: Other M and WarioWare: D.I.Y.
Metroid and WarioWare producer Yoshio Sakamoto on Metroid not being as popular in Japan as it is in the U.S…
“In Japan, the people who are into Metroid tend to be hardcore game fans. It’s not a series that’s necessarily found acceptance in Japan outside of that niche. You can also say that it’s the same as how science fiction is embraced in the United States compared to Japan. Science fiction seems to be a niche genre in Japan as a whole, where it seems to have found more mainstream success in the US.”
Sakamoto on whether Other M is being made to appeal to the Japanese market…
“We are conscious of that, and Japanese market acceptance is in our mind. There’s an expression in Japanese, where someone dislikes a food without ever having eaten it. You have to offer those people a certain incentive to taste the food to prevent them from saying that they don’t like it. So, we’re trying a new approach here and we’re trying to pull a new audience in to see if they like it. Having said that, we’re still going for a global acceptance with Metroid Other M, but we’re trying a game style that has worldwide market appeal that even Japanese people will like.”
Sakamoto on why Team Ninja was asked to help with Other M…
“(laughs) Well, let me state as clearly as I can that we didn’t choose Team Ninja solely to present the sexiest Samus possible. Rather it was about the shared vision of the Metroid world. We thought, who can best convey this world we have in our minds. We needed the help of a team that had a lot of recent experience making 3D action games. We figured this was the best vehicle to get the sense of the world across. We found that after talking with Team Ninja that not only did they understand what we were talking about but they were also very passionate about the design concepts. After a bit of discussion it was clear that we were on the same wavelength and could proceed on shared goals. And that shared goal wasn’t that we wanted to have Samus be sexy (laughs).
But I have to say, Team Ninja has done a wonderful job making sure that Samus is presented as a very appealing character, and I hope you have seen this in some of the sequences we’ve been showing.”
Sakamoto on why he was against nunchuck support in Other M…
“Two reasons. The first, with the team I’ve been working with, we’ve been making the Metroid series in 2D up to this point. Even though we’ve been looking for a way to control Samus in 3D, we wanted to achieve the feeling that you had when Samus was in 2D. We decided that the traditional D-pad for movement plus jumping and shooting on buttons was the most appropriate control scheme for this direction. The second reason, and let me preface this by saying I don’t think bad games use the nunchuk because there are a lot of great games that do, there’s a certain image created with the nunchuk, it’s a bit of a barrier in accessibility because it’s a “different” control. The nunchuk I think is more appropriate for core audiences. At the same time, I feel that showing people a 3D game where you can control it using the remote really does stir the imagination, they’ll think “How’s it possible to control the character using the sideways remote in 3D?” I also think it’s attractive to those who grew up playing games using this kind of control.”
Sakamoto on whether Other M will have a nunchuck option…
“No, there is no alternate control setting in Metroid Other M. Honestly, If we felt there was any more comfortable way to play the game then what we were envisioning, then we would have certainly would have just done that. But we do feel that this is the most appropriate and most comfortable way of playing the game and I don’t think we made the wrong choice. We want to emphasize that this is the best way, we stuck with a single control scheme and were very committed to that from the beginning.”
Sakamoto on whether other Wii teams will use the “Famicom Control Plus” control scheme that Other M is using…
“To be honest, we actually pretty separate from the Miyamoto-led teams so I’m really not sure what they’re up to right now. The nunchuk may be great for some types of games but we wouldn’t want to force people to use just one type of control because that would be restrictive. As a personal goal of mine I’ve been trying to find a way to present the most amazing game I can and have it use a control scheme with a relatively limited amount of buttons. This has been a fixed idea for us for awhile, but this may be completely different from the design philosophy of other development teams.”
Sakamoto on why WarioWare D.I.Y. doesn’t use the DSi camera nor microphone…
“Well, whenever a new hardware comes along, we’re able to reflect it in a new WarioWare game. With WarioWare Snapped, we felt that was our camera game. And WarioWare Touched used a lot of microphone functionality…”
Sakamoto on whether there was a memory restriction for the camera/microphone…
“I remember talking to the director of WarioWare DIY about this very thing, and it wasn’t really a memory limitation that kept us from doing this. When we had early talks, we talked about what you could do using actual photographs. We felt that the limitations were more in scope in design, like we felt that users would just use it to swap in backgrounds. And that went against our vision and design spec.
But now that I think about it, there may have been some memory restrictions, too. You have a set size for games in D.I.Y. and if we allowed for photos we probably would have run up against those memory barriers.”
Sakamoto on why WarioWare D.I.Y. is restrictive and only lets you create tap-based mini-games…
“The idea is to make the games easy to make and to play, and in general if you limit what you can do in these games, you have a better sense of what can go wrong, too. So to make it a smooth and enjoyable experience we restricted the scope to just taps.”
Sakamoto on whether Samus was always planned to be female…
“Oh, it was something that came up in the end. At the time we had very little experience making games, but we had a great time doing it. We realized towards the end that we wanted to throw in one more fun little extra surprise. We were all sitting around and one of the staff members said, what if Samus took off the helmet and it turned out she was a woman? And everyone said, “I like it!” So we went and did that, and made it a great reward for players to experience something at the end.
And of course, if someone plays through and gets the helmet removed, they’ll think “Wow, I wonder what will happen if I do even better?” I think it was one of the first “alternate endings” in a game.”
