http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3161645
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A couple weeks back we sat down with Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune and gave him our full-court press to revive the Mega Man Legends series. Of course, we talked with him about other things, as well -- including Resident Evil 5, a Shadows of Rome sequel, Mega Man and Onimusha. Above (also found on GameVideos) and below (the full text) is the result of that interview:
1UP: One of the topics we discussed in our last interview was what it would take for you to create the final piece of the Mega Man Legends saga, and it pretty much came down to a lot of money. Well, I ran a poll last night to gauge people's interest in the long-lost threequel and the results were pretty significant, especially since the poll has only been up less than a day. I just wanted to let you know there was some bona fide interest in the game and that you shouldn't give up on it.
Keiji Inafune: [Laughs] I'm pretty high up in Capcom, but perhaps once I'm a little higher up and they'll let me make any game I want then I can do it. But not quite yet, I still have to answer to management.
1UP: Well if there's anything we can do to help turn the tide, let us know.
KI: So if we do end up making it, you'll be in on it and you'll have to help me out and do some surveys to see what people want. Just wait until I work my way up a little more where I can do what I want to. [Laughs]
1UP: OK, since you oversee all of Capcom's software development, I figure I'll jump around to various topics, starting with Resident Evil 5.
KI: OK.
1UP: Resident Evil 4 was a real reboot for the series. It really reinvented it, it made some serious strides, the controls were massively improved, the graphics were amazing, the story was incredible and the game was long. It had every improvement that the series needed. Will RE5 feature at least the same primary control scheme as RE4, and will it continue on the improvements that RE4 made?
KI: I can't specifically answer that, but I will say that myself and everybody else obviously in the press thought that with Resident Evil 4...the production values, everything like you said that Resident needed to be improved upon was improved. So then where is there room for improvement? Do we keep it the same, do we change this? So that is something we have to evaluate within Capcom and make sure that it not only meets the level of RE4 but exceeds that. Unfortunately I can't talk about controls at this time, but in the near future I'll know a little more about that.
1UP: But it won't regress back to pre-RE4 tank-like controls right?
KI: Hopefully beyond, but that's up to you...the people who put the points on the reviews. [Laughs]
1UP: Unlike most Resident Evils, this one seems fairly bright, at least from what we can tell from the trailer, and doesn't necessarily take place at night or in the sewers, it seems like more of an outdoor thing, which sort of follows the recent movie somewhat.
KI: So, there is no correlation between the movies and the games, except some of the movies are based on previous games, so there's no real coming together of that. The reason it seems sunny and outside is because we're trying to take the series to a new place. In the past and with most of our movies and games you'd think of 'dark is scary.' But we wanted to try something new and see what else we could do. And if you look at Lost Planet when we were making that we decided 'what can we do to show off the power of the next-generation hardware?' And that was 'snow,' not only snow you walk on and your feet sink into, but with the snowstorm and blizzards and fog and everything. So with RE5 something we really wanted to try as a challenge to ourselves and for the game was to see what we could do with sunlight. How realistic...how can we use the sun and different effects from that and using light in the game as another way to put another theme in the series for us.
1UP: That's interesting because...not to say that anyone's copying anybody...but that's kind of like what Hideo Kojima did with Metal Gear Solid 3, he took it out of the corridors and brought it out into the open. Do you think Resident Evil 5 is kind of a reaction to all the things you've done before in the series?
KI: When going with the PlayStation 2 and we were creating the Resident Evil games for that and the other consoles previously, we had lights that you could put in the game, but making shadows...the shadows weren't real shadows. You had to make the shadows and do whatever you could to play with the shadowing. But with the new hardware, we're able to use real lights and real shadows, including self-shadowing, where you have shadows on yourself as you move around. As developers we make games, but we want to try new things and challenge ourselves. We said "Now that we can do this"...like for Lost Planet we made the snow...so now that we can do realistic light, we thought "What can we do with this?" So we think about light and shadow, and if we do light as a design phase of the game, and have that as a theme. Where do we set the game? Where do we take the player in the game? So it's not going to be a place that's dark most of the time, or it's not going to be at night or a place that's all snowy, so that's how things got going to where it's set in the trailer.
1UP: Since the game is for PS3 and Xbox 360, does this indicate that the game is using the Lost Planet engine, or is it an all-new technology?
KI: This is the same engine...it's not an engine made specifically for Lost Planet...it's more of an engine designed to make it easier to make multi-platform games. We can now make multiplatform games much easier than having to make it specifically for one platform and reconvert everything for another, which is a party of our strategy. But of course we've been working on RE5 now and Lost Planet is already out, but the engine itself has gone through a lot of tuning and tweaking and improvements. So it's not going to look like Lost Planet with different settings. It'll look much much better.
1UP: This question might be a little touchy because I'm not sure of the politics involved, but is Shinji Mikami involved with this at all?
KI: Mikami-san is not involved with the game. We feel we have plenty of talented people. We have most of the people who worked on RE4 plus we have very talented people who came over from the Clover Studio team, and we brought in some other really talented game developers, so we feel we have enough great people that even without Mikami-san this should be a great game.
1UP: So you brought on some people formerly of Clover?
KI: When Clover Studio was no more, a lot of the staff stayed at Capcom and so they were absorbed into other teams. Clover Studio had a lot of talented people, so a lot of them are working on RE5.
1UP: Not to question the talent or commitment of the RE5 team, but Shinji Mikami was definitely responsible for a lot of games that were cool and tangibly exciting. What would you say that Mikami brought to the RE series that was unique to him, and how do you replace that?
KI: Shinji Mikami is a very talented game designer and game creator and of course, like you said, he brought his style to the games and a lot of ideas to the games. Part of that is the passion he brought out in people he worked with, but of course with him not on the game this time means we need to try and fill a void that he had there. We're not trying to emulate his style or anything. We just need to make this a very cool game in our own way. Even without him we have plenty of talented people trying to make this new iteration in the series and we'll make it as cool as we can.
1UP: A few years back, one of Capcom's mission statements was to decipher the North American market, because you realized it would be increasingly important to capitalize on the potential there as the Japanese game market becomes more conservative in their buying habits. One of the first games to come out of that initiative was Shadow of Rome. Has there ever been any thought to creating a sequel to that game?
KI: I don't know if I've told anyone this, but actually Dead Rising started off as a sequel to Shadow of Rome. So the concept was there, and we knew we wanted to make a game for the Western market, but we wanted to make something different with that. So all of the team members from Shadow of Rome ended up making Dead Rising. So the concept was there, but it changed story and setting and time periods. So Dead Rising got its start as a Shadow of Rome sequel.
1UP: But is there any chance of an actual Shadow sequel?
KI: Maybe if we made something like the 300 movie. I'm just joking around, but that's what we were thinking, some over-the-top violence.
1UP: So, basically Shadow of Rome minus the stealth elements.
KI: Yeah, hypothetically-speaking -- we're not planning this -- but if we were going to make Shadow of Rome 2, we'd get rid of all the stealth elements and give all the violence you hurried through the stealth parts to get to. [Laughs]
1UP: Since everything has to be online these days, would you say that RE5 is going to have online elements?
KI: [Laughs] So as we were hypothetically-speaking about any possible sequel to Shadow of Rome. We also can't really speak about RE5, but just overall Capcom as a company we want to make sure we include more elements since that's such a big part of gaming, whether it's Lost Planet's multi-player or the DS games with communication. it's something we want to add to any games that seems feasible or possible.
1UP: OK, a couple quick one: Onimusha, what's going on with that, and how do you feel about Genji, the Onimusha rip-off made by former Capcom employee Yoshiki Okamoto's Game Republic?
KI: First of all, please don't group Onimusha and that Genji game together. Personally I'd wonder about someone who says "I don't want to make an Onimusha sequel" and then leaves the company and goes off and makes a rip-off of Onimusha.
1UP: So does this mean you have a next-gen Onimusha cookin'?
KI: In the position I have at Capcom, none of our franchises really die. So there's always something floating around in my head and when next-generation hardware comes out, the topic comes up. So of course I think of every Capcom franchise, and while I might not think concretely about "this is what I want to do," but any game that we ever make I'm always thinking what I could do with a sequel. More than an Onimusha sequel, personally I'd rather make the sequel to Mega Man Legeneds 3. [Laughs] So it's just about convincing the right people to let me make it.
1UP: YES! Good answer. OK, but if you did make a new Onimusha, would you rather license a real actor's likeness, or go the route you took on the last game where it was all fictional characters?
KI: In my own opinion, how I felt about the series after 1, 2 and 3 having real actors in the game, and seeing what kind of edge that gave the entertainment value, and then seeing number 4 not having real characters, just personally to me it felt like there was something missing. So if I were ever to go back to the Onimusha series, after I've done some other projects, I'd probably try to put that element back into the game.
1UP: Have you ever thought about having a female actor as the main character in an Onimusha game, since all of the leads have been male actors?
KI: Personally in making games, I'd like to make more female main characters, but the people around me say "You can't make a female main character, it's not going to sell. It won't work." So everybody says no to me when I want more female characters.
1UP: Sounds like it's time for us to do another poll. Lastly, do you have anything you'd like to say in regards to Mega Man's 20th anniversary?
KI: First of all I'd like to say thank you to people who've bought Mega Man games over the years, especially the people who have been supporting him from the beginning. I created Mega Man, I love Mega Man, and I hope he continues for 20 more years and maybe he'll turn 40. I just hope that everybody continues to support him and I'll do my best to keep giving you good games to play.
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A couple weeks back we sat down with Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune and gave him our full-court press to revive the Mega Man Legends series. Of course, we talked with him about other things, as well -- including Resident Evil 5, a Shadows of Rome sequel, Mega Man and Onimusha. Above (also found on GameVideos) and below (the full text) is the result of that interview:
1UP: One of the topics we discussed in our last interview was what it would take for you to create the final piece of the Mega Man Legends saga, and it pretty much came down to a lot of money. Well, I ran a poll last night to gauge people's interest in the long-lost threequel and the results were pretty significant, especially since the poll has only been up less than a day. I just wanted to let you know there was some bona fide interest in the game and that you shouldn't give up on it.
Keiji Inafune: [Laughs] I'm pretty high up in Capcom, but perhaps once I'm a little higher up and they'll let me make any game I want then I can do it. But not quite yet, I still have to answer to management.
1UP: Well if there's anything we can do to help turn the tide, let us know.
KI: So if we do end up making it, you'll be in on it and you'll have to help me out and do some surveys to see what people want. Just wait until I work my way up a little more where I can do what I want to. [Laughs]
1UP: OK, since you oversee all of Capcom's software development, I figure I'll jump around to various topics, starting with Resident Evil 5.
KI: OK.
1UP: Resident Evil 4 was a real reboot for the series. It really reinvented it, it made some serious strides, the controls were massively improved, the graphics were amazing, the story was incredible and the game was long. It had every improvement that the series needed. Will RE5 feature at least the same primary control scheme as RE4, and will it continue on the improvements that RE4 made?
KI: I can't specifically answer that, but I will say that myself and everybody else obviously in the press thought that with Resident Evil 4...the production values, everything like you said that Resident needed to be improved upon was improved. So then where is there room for improvement? Do we keep it the same, do we change this? So that is something we have to evaluate within Capcom and make sure that it not only meets the level of RE4 but exceeds that. Unfortunately I can't talk about controls at this time, but in the near future I'll know a little more about that.
1UP: But it won't regress back to pre-RE4 tank-like controls right?
KI: Hopefully beyond, but that's up to you...the people who put the points on the reviews. [Laughs]
1UP: Unlike most Resident Evils, this one seems fairly bright, at least from what we can tell from the trailer, and doesn't necessarily take place at night or in the sewers, it seems like more of an outdoor thing, which sort of follows the recent movie somewhat.
KI: So, there is no correlation between the movies and the games, except some of the movies are based on previous games, so there's no real coming together of that. The reason it seems sunny and outside is because we're trying to take the series to a new place. In the past and with most of our movies and games you'd think of 'dark is scary.' But we wanted to try something new and see what else we could do. And if you look at Lost Planet when we were making that we decided 'what can we do to show off the power of the next-generation hardware?' And that was 'snow,' not only snow you walk on and your feet sink into, but with the snowstorm and blizzards and fog and everything. So with RE5 something we really wanted to try as a challenge to ourselves and for the game was to see what we could do with sunlight. How realistic...how can we use the sun and different effects from that and using light in the game as another way to put another theme in the series for us.
1UP: That's interesting because...not to say that anyone's copying anybody...but that's kind of like what Hideo Kojima did with Metal Gear Solid 3, he took it out of the corridors and brought it out into the open. Do you think Resident Evil 5 is kind of a reaction to all the things you've done before in the series?
KI: When going with the PlayStation 2 and we were creating the Resident Evil games for that and the other consoles previously, we had lights that you could put in the game, but making shadows...the shadows weren't real shadows. You had to make the shadows and do whatever you could to play with the shadowing. But with the new hardware, we're able to use real lights and real shadows, including self-shadowing, where you have shadows on yourself as you move around. As developers we make games, but we want to try new things and challenge ourselves. We said "Now that we can do this"...like for Lost Planet we made the snow...so now that we can do realistic light, we thought "What can we do with this?" So we think about light and shadow, and if we do light as a design phase of the game, and have that as a theme. Where do we set the game? Where do we take the player in the game? So it's not going to be a place that's dark most of the time, or it's not going to be at night or a place that's all snowy, so that's how things got going to where it's set in the trailer.
1UP: Since the game is for PS3 and Xbox 360, does this indicate that the game is using the Lost Planet engine, or is it an all-new technology?
KI: This is the same engine...it's not an engine made specifically for Lost Planet...it's more of an engine designed to make it easier to make multi-platform games. We can now make multiplatform games much easier than having to make it specifically for one platform and reconvert everything for another, which is a party of our strategy. But of course we've been working on RE5 now and Lost Planet is already out, but the engine itself has gone through a lot of tuning and tweaking and improvements. So it's not going to look like Lost Planet with different settings. It'll look much much better.
1UP: This question might be a little touchy because I'm not sure of the politics involved, but is Shinji Mikami involved with this at all?
KI: Mikami-san is not involved with the game. We feel we have plenty of talented people. We have most of the people who worked on RE4 plus we have very talented people who came over from the Clover Studio team, and we brought in some other really talented game developers, so we feel we have enough great people that even without Mikami-san this should be a great game.
1UP: So you brought on some people formerly of Clover?
KI: When Clover Studio was no more, a lot of the staff stayed at Capcom and so they were absorbed into other teams. Clover Studio had a lot of talented people, so a lot of them are working on RE5.
1UP: Not to question the talent or commitment of the RE5 team, but Shinji Mikami was definitely responsible for a lot of games that were cool and tangibly exciting. What would you say that Mikami brought to the RE series that was unique to him, and how do you replace that?
KI: Shinji Mikami is a very talented game designer and game creator and of course, like you said, he brought his style to the games and a lot of ideas to the games. Part of that is the passion he brought out in people he worked with, but of course with him not on the game this time means we need to try and fill a void that he had there. We're not trying to emulate his style or anything. We just need to make this a very cool game in our own way. Even without him we have plenty of talented people trying to make this new iteration in the series and we'll make it as cool as we can.
1UP: A few years back, one of Capcom's mission statements was to decipher the North American market, because you realized it would be increasingly important to capitalize on the potential there as the Japanese game market becomes more conservative in their buying habits. One of the first games to come out of that initiative was Shadow of Rome. Has there ever been any thought to creating a sequel to that game?
KI: I don't know if I've told anyone this, but actually Dead Rising started off as a sequel to Shadow of Rome. So the concept was there, and we knew we wanted to make a game for the Western market, but we wanted to make something different with that. So all of the team members from Shadow of Rome ended up making Dead Rising. So the concept was there, but it changed story and setting and time periods. So Dead Rising got its start as a Shadow of Rome sequel.
1UP: But is there any chance of an actual Shadow sequel?
KI: Maybe if we made something like the 300 movie. I'm just joking around, but that's what we were thinking, some over-the-top violence.
1UP: So, basically Shadow of Rome minus the stealth elements.
KI: Yeah, hypothetically-speaking -- we're not planning this -- but if we were going to make Shadow of Rome 2, we'd get rid of all the stealth elements and give all the violence you hurried through the stealth parts to get to. [Laughs]
1UP: Since everything has to be online these days, would you say that RE5 is going to have online elements?
KI: [Laughs] So as we were hypothetically-speaking about any possible sequel to Shadow of Rome. We also can't really speak about RE5, but just overall Capcom as a company we want to make sure we include more elements since that's such a big part of gaming, whether it's Lost Planet's multi-player or the DS games with communication. it's something we want to add to any games that seems feasible or possible.
1UP: OK, a couple quick one: Onimusha, what's going on with that, and how do you feel about Genji, the Onimusha rip-off made by former Capcom employee Yoshiki Okamoto's Game Republic?
KI: First of all, please don't group Onimusha and that Genji game together. Personally I'd wonder about someone who says "I don't want to make an Onimusha sequel" and then leaves the company and goes off and makes a rip-off of Onimusha.
1UP: So does this mean you have a next-gen Onimusha cookin'?
KI: In the position I have at Capcom, none of our franchises really die. So there's always something floating around in my head and when next-generation hardware comes out, the topic comes up. So of course I think of every Capcom franchise, and while I might not think concretely about "this is what I want to do," but any game that we ever make I'm always thinking what I could do with a sequel. More than an Onimusha sequel, personally I'd rather make the sequel to Mega Man Legeneds 3. [Laughs] So it's just about convincing the right people to let me make it.
1UP: YES! Good answer. OK, but if you did make a new Onimusha, would you rather license a real actor's likeness, or go the route you took on the last game where it was all fictional characters?
KI: In my own opinion, how I felt about the series after 1, 2 and 3 having real actors in the game, and seeing what kind of edge that gave the entertainment value, and then seeing number 4 not having real characters, just personally to me it felt like there was something missing. So if I were ever to go back to the Onimusha series, after I've done some other projects, I'd probably try to put that element back into the game.
1UP: Have you ever thought about having a female actor as the main character in an Onimusha game, since all of the leads have been male actors?
KI: Personally in making games, I'd like to make more female main characters, but the people around me say "You can't make a female main character, it's not going to sell. It won't work." So everybody says no to me when I want more female characters.
1UP: Sounds like it's time for us to do another poll. Lastly, do you have anything you'd like to say in regards to Mega Man's 20th anniversary?
KI: First of all I'd like to say thank you to people who've bought Mega Man games over the years, especially the people who have been supporting him from the beginning. I created Mega Man, I love Mega Man, and I hope he continues for 20 more years and maybe he'll turn 40. I just hope that everybody continues to support him and I'll do my best to keep giving you good games to play.
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