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Animal Crossing: New Horizons

With the coronavirus becoming a global pandemic, many people are staying inside and self-quarantining in hopes of avoid a further spread of the disease. That means many are turning to entertainment, including video games.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons may not have come at a better time. Speaking with The Verge, producer Hisashi Nogami said that he’s “very disheartened and saddened by the events happening across the world”, but Nintendo is hoping that “a lot of the Animal Crossing fans will use this as an escape, so they can enjoy themselves during this difficult time.”

Nogami’s full words:

IGN recently spoke with Animal Crossing: New Horizons director Aya Kyogoku and producer Hisashi Nogami. During the interview, one of the topics discussed was the collaboration art that fans have been making for the new Switch game and Doom Eternal. These two titles technically only share the same release date, but the internet has really run with the idea of Animal Crossing and Doom coming together.

Kyogoku told IGN:

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Most Switch games make use of cloud saves through Nintendo Switch Online. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, however, isn’t one of those.

Speaking with IGN, director Aya Kyogoku and producer Hisashi Nogami explained that the lack of compatibility is in place to preventing cheating. Nogami noted how Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an online game, and cheating is a concern with such titles. Kyogoku, meanwhile, also said that the in-game economy could be abused if cloud saves were enabled.

In a recent issue of Famitsu, PlatinumGames’ Hideki Kamiya bonded with game director and scenario writer, Taro Yoko, over their mutual unwillingness to compromise on their creative visions. This prompted Yoko to bring up the topic of The Wonderful 101, as he had heard that the art direction for the game was quite different in the very beginning of development.

Kamiya explained the situation in our translation below:

After it was teased on Mario Day, Nintendo and LEGO unveiled a new partnership featuring the well-known platforming character. Mario and friends will be offered in LEGO form later this year with a new type of experience.

Speaking with The Brothers Brick, digital design lead Jonathan Bennink revealed that this project has been in the works for over four years. He also spoke about how to partnership with Nintendo came about, stating:

Shigeru Miyamoto has been responsible for some of the most iconic game franchises ranging from Mario to Zelda. These days though, he’s not quite involved in Nintendo development as he used to be. Miyamoto could be interested in making a new, smaller-scale title down the road, but told Famitsu in the Japanese magazine’s latest issue that he’s busy with other projects.

Here’s our full exchange between Miyamoto and Famitsu:

After the negative reception of the Super Mario Bros. film in 1993, Nintendo put the breaks on pursuing movies. Yet now after so much time has passed, the Big N is giving things another shot. Illumination is on board to create a brand new Mario-based movie with Despicable Me producer Chris Meledandri. Nintendo is overseeing the process and Shigeru Miyamoto is heavily involved.

As part of a lengthy interview in Famitsu this week, Miyamoto spoke about meeting Meledandri for the first time and how that eventually led to the Mario film. One of the important parts of their conversation was when Meledandri brought up a past failure, which convinced Miyamoto that he could be trusted.

Here’s our full translation of the interview excerpt:

In Famitsu’s recent 12-page interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, he was asked about Nintendo’s plans moving forward. Considering Nintendo has been diversifying their interests in the past few years at a brisk pace, the public is eager to hear about Nintendo’s activity.

Here’s our translation of the excerpt:

Miyamoto: We want to expand our video game characters to a variety of settings – not just in games, all while keeping their value. In other words, we’ll be collaborating with various other companies. If we’re able to accomplish that, we can create more opportunities for people to make contact with our characters on a much larger scale than usual.

We’ve translated many other highlights from the interview here, here and here. Look forward to more translations in the coming days.

Yoshinori Kitase has had a long and prestigious career at Square Enix. He joined the company in 1990, and one of the first games he worked on was Final Fantasy V. Because of that, and given that Square Enix hasn’t done a realistic retelling, he’d be up for remaking that RPG someday.

Kitase told GameReactor in a recent interview:

PlatinumGames has published a new interview with The Wonderful 101 director Hideki Kamiya. Below, Kamiya talks about the new remastered version, what he’s been playing lately, and more.


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