As part of a Kickstarter update, PlatinumGames announced today that The Wonderful 101: Remastered will make its playable debut on Switch at PAX East 2020. The expo will take place between February 27 and March 1 at the Boston Convention Center.
PlatinumGames’ plans don’t stop there. The studio will be hosting a panel, “101 Things You Didn’t Know About PlatinumGames”, in which Atsushi Inaba and Hideki Kamiya will discuss “how they united, where they’re going, and what they have in store for the future.” This will take place on February 29 between 2 PM and 3 PM ET.
Finally, here are some lengthy comments from Kamiya discussing the creation of Wonder-Red in The Wonderful 101:
Design Decisions
It was a lot of work to come up with 100 different ideas for how each of the Wonderful 100 would look, but as far as the first member, Wonder-Red goes, he was actually decided on pretty quickly.
Wonder-Red was designed by a designer named Mai Okura. She joined the team as a new hire when we first started working on Bayonetta, and served as the UI designer. I really liked her sense of design, so when we started developing The Wonderful 101 I chose her to be the main designer.
I still wasn’t sure myself what sort of design would be best, so I just told her about the character details and let her draw freely on her own. This is what she came up with.
As you can see, this design is pretty much the final design. The truth is, she also came up with another design, but I couldn’t find it on my old HDD. Sorry! I liked this one more, and pretty much decided on it the first time I saw it.
There was one big change, though – the way the hair grows out of Wonder-Red’s head. According to Okura, “a wide forehead is sexier,” but I asked her to make him look “normal” instead. (LOL) And so it changed into what I showed you before.
Once we decided on this format, we began work on the other 99. It was a staggering amount of work, but it was a lot of fun coming up with all those different ideas.
These are the characters we first came up with when we started freely brainstorming. You can see that the designs for Blue and Yellow weren’t that unique yet, despite the fact that they’re main characters.
This is a piece from when the designs grew closer to their final versions, when we were trying to add more unique characteristics to the main characters. Thanks to Okura bestowing her wisdom on us here and there, I remember us not arguing too much and deciding on things rather smoothly.
I have a little extra for you today – another design image from the very beginning.
Here’s one of the possible titles I came up with during the development.
There were some problems with the title “The Wonderful 100,” so I decided to try thinking of something else. That’s what I came up with – something created from fusing the number 100 with a bunch of small characters. It was something I came up with as a Japanese native, so I wasn’t sure how it would look or sound to English speakers. It actually went over even worse than “The Wonderful 100,” so it was quickly abandoned. (LOL)
You’ll notice that in some of the initial design art of the team members, the letter “C” can be seen on their chests. (You should be able to find some if you search for it on the internet.) That’s a remnant from the short period when “Centi-Men” had temporarily become the title.
That concludes my discussion on the initial designs!
