Arakawa: I remember how I came to realize the capabilities of the DS then, thinking how amazing the touch screen was.
Hasegawa: It was really fun, getting to try out the touch screen.
Arakawa: I thought that it was awesome how I could really see what I touched do something in the game. When I first learned about the DS I had an idea that the bottom screen could be used for card games, like an extension to CHAIN OF MEMORIES. On the upper screen would be something like an action RPG. But after a while we wanted to use the touch screen for something more…
Kando: I remember your first planning documents. You had the idea of an action game that you controlled with the touch screen.
Arakawa: Right. Since we were going to be using a touch screen I thought that we should go in this direction, but we didn’t even know the technical limitations of the touch screen yet, so we couldn’t fully rely on it. I sent my plan anyway and made revisions, went to the show again, played with the DS some more… After a while the game plan started to concentrate on the lower screen more. I felt that the game wouldn’t do the DS justice if it didn’t use the touch screen.
Kando: In the beginning the three of us kept sending game ideas and were in arguments about it.
Arakawa: Right. I remember being chewed out by Mr. Nomura. He’d say “No, we could do this on the PSP,” or something like that. The hurdle was really high from the get-go, because we set out to create “a game that can only be played on the DS.”
Hasegawa: Coming up with what to do with the two screens was the biggest challenge.
Kando: We initially thought that the player would control the game on the bottom screen and watch the action happen on the top screen, but that always made one of the screens less important.
Arakawa: Right. At the beginning, we were saying, “There’s no way we can use two screens,” but we kept playing with the idea that we could have a battle on both screens.
Kando: And that was the answer we were looking for. We shifted our thoughts to making a game that would utilize every function of the Nintendo DS, something truly worthy of the system. That’s how the dual-screen battle was born.