With E3 just days away, we secured an interview with Sohei Niikawa, the Managing Director of Nippon Ichi Software, where he talks at length about their recently released tactical RPG, La Pucelle: Tactics for the PlayStation 2.
Who are Nippon Ichi Software? Headquartered in Japan, the company started life back in the Super Famicom days. It produced five titles for the Super Famicom in the '90s, one game for Saturn, around 20 titles for PlayStation, and fully supports the PlayStation 2. Nippon Ichi has started to strengthen its overseas operations with the opening of its office in Anaheim, California. Games developed by Nippon Ichi include Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure for the PS One, the critically-acclaimed tactical RPG, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and the upcoming Phantom Brave; both for the PlayStation 2. Media We have a total of 16 screens for this game.
I am Sohei Niikawa, Managing Director of Nippon Ichi Software. For La Pucelle: Tactics, I wrote the story and acted as the overall producer.
La Pucelle: Tactics and Disgaea were born from the same production team. There were about 20 of us, totally focused on making an entertaining game, no less. It is a smallish team for a game like this, but I'd say we have the best people. A smaller team allows for better communication, too, so the projects go smoothly. All of us here are very proud that we were able to make something that got the support from so many people from around the world.
What's the background story and premise behind La Pucelle: Tactics?
The story is set in an alternate medieval Europe, and has a firm religious/mystical tone. However, the characters' actions depart from that framework. This is especially true in the case of Prier. I wanted her and other characters to be forced to abandon their former, traditional worldview and have a new outlook emerge.
The reason for choosing them to be exorcists is that it was relatively easy to design a fun game with that premise. Having magical powers and using them to fight evil --- who wouldn’t get a kick out of that?
A lot of people seem to think that 3D graphics are just great but I think it's easier to develop a character's attractiveness with 2D graphics. To see proof of that just look at Japanese animation. I think it's really too bad when people say that graphics are of poor quality just because they are 2D. We feel really good about our 2D graphics.
What are the differences and/or similarities between La Pucelle and Nippon Ichi's critically-acclaimed Disgaea: Hour of Darkness? Will there be any character/storyline crossover involved?
They were made by the same production team. But they are very different games.
One of the differences is that La Pucelle has a stronger story line. We were more focused on the story for La Pucelle. You will probably see a deeper worldview in that game. When we were doing Disagea, we were more focused on the strategic gameplay.
There is some character overlap in the two games, but I'm not going to give away too much here. You have to play both to know who's in both!
What are the challenges faced by the team in the localization process of La Pucelle?
Because the North American version came after the Korean version there weren't any technical or production surprises. For the North American version, because we did all the voices in English, there was quite a bit of work incorporating the new sound files into the game. The Japanese game is on a CD, but the North American version uses a DVD because we left the Japanese voices in as an option and ran out of disk space. It costs more to produce a DVD than a CD but it was a feature Mastiff felt the US fans would really appreciate so we went ahead and did it.
We were delighted to see Mastiff's excellent work in the translation of the dialogue and text, and their casting for the North American version. We are very grateful for their efforts.
Can you elaborate on the game play mechanics of the game. Will it play out exactly as Disgaea (which is not necessarily a bad thing)?
No, there are similarities but it's not Disgaea.
Similarities:
- The ability to move multiple units at the same time once you have the actions registered, that was carried over into Disgaea.
- The Miracles in La Pucelle: Tactics became the basis of the Geo Panel in Disgaea.
Differences:
- La Pucelle: Tactics switches to 2D during combat scenes, Disgaea remains in 3D map view.
- System to strengthen items is a bit different in the two games, too.
Can you expand a bit on the leveling up process?
Leveling is an indispensable element in RPG games. It is up to the game designers to make the leveling tough or to make it entertaining. We want to make it fun. One feature in La Pucelle: Tactics that we are fond of is that you could purify your enemies of their evil and make then your allies. Once they become your friend, they can work with you to fight the enemies.
That sounds like a great feature for the players. How will this work out in the game?
The command we use to turn enemies into allies is Purify. It depends on the enemy's parameters how many times you have to use the command, but when purified, even the most horrible monster starts thinking maybe he'd like to be on the good guys' team. When this feeling gets strong enough, he converts and becomes your friend. That's when you can point the cursor to his base panel, to use him in combat as a part of your team.
Now that would give a termendous advantage to the player. How do you keep the game from becoming too easy or too hard? In other words, how do you ensure the game is balanced in the difficulty level?
There is no easy way to balance gameplay. Testing is the key. We play our games numerous times ourselves, and also have a lot of people play it for us. People who are good at games, people who are new to games --- the accumulated data helps us to get it just right.
Nowadays, gamers are beginning to get tired of stale and uninspired titles. How do you make the gameplay stay fresh on repeated plays?
Freshness and depth of gameplay. Those are the things that really matter. It is the game system that is the most important. The beauty of the graphics, the charm of the characters, the twists in the story all add to the game system, but they are of secondary importance. The reason some people say there are stale and uninspired games is probably that a lot of games focus too much on the secondary qualities and forget to strengthen what's most important.
Based on the success of Disgaea and hightened expectations of La Pucelle, do you have any plan for sequels? Any chance well be seeing Disgaea or La Pucelle being rolled out as franchises, like Final Fantasy or Suikoden?
We don't have plans to make sequels at the moment, but if fans want it we will certainly consider it. I also want to create new titles while our team here is in its prime. Sequels are an attractive notion, but we want to keep pushing ourselves into unknown territories.
