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INTERVIEW
PART - THREE / FIVE
Q:
Could you tell us a little about the game itself?
T: The game is in the RPG genre, but the method of storytelling is greatly
different. Most RPGs are set up to have different subplots dotted around
the world, waiting to be connected together by the player and develop into
a complete picture. If you talk to someone in one town, you're then
allowed to hear someone else's story in another town. Of course, this is
part of the fun of the genre, but in this game I didn't want the story to
grind to a halt because you didn't set a flag somewhere. In Xenosaga the
story and game sections are completely independent of each other. To put
it in an extreme way, I wanted a game that could be turned into a drama if
you extracted all the story portions and put them on video.
Q: The event scenes seem longer than usual, but you weren't worried about
the user getting bored?
T: That's the difficult part. It's easy to see when an event's just too
long... but the storyteller side of me wants the player to get through the
game part as quickly as possible, because he wants to see what happens
next.
Q: Are all of the events in 3D this time?
T: We used regular animation in the previous game, but around the point
the 3D screens and maps were completed, I suddenly realized I really
wanted to go for 3D instead. I didn't follow through with it back then,
but this time around I managed to follow my desire. I've been blessed with
some extremely talented people in the field of 3D animation as well.
Q: What are some of the difficulties 3D presents compared to 2D?
T: Well, both the characters and the backdrops are entirely 3D, so you
can't use the symbolistic direction you see in animated TV shows. If you
don't direct it the same way you would a film, the results just look
strange. As a result, for this game we made continuity and layout sheets
for all the event scenes.
Q: So it was very similar to developing a movie.
T: Right. Of course, this is CG we're talking about, so as a director I
want to take advantage of the things you can't do in real life. The
biggest difference is in the camerawork. Angles that'd be impossible to
shoot from in real life are accessible in the world of CG. You can have
the camera go into objects and still be able to shoot right through them.
Q: Are the cameras completely fixed?
T: They're divided into two types: free cameras that can move with the
characters, and stationary cameras that simply track their movements. Some
RPGs let you change camera angles any way you want, but Xenosaga just
switches between follow and set cameras. The maps are mainly set so that
north is always up; they've been tweaked to keep players from getting lost
as often as they did in the first game.
Q: The NPC animation we saw was amazing too. Some enemies chase after you
on first sight, while some you see prowling around their prey...
T: The animation's become quite complex, since the enemies are right on
the map this time. They've been given a fair amount of strategic AI --
some of them come right up when you get near them, and some you can tiptoe
right past without them noticing. A side effect of that is that we had to
include a fair amount of freedom in character movement as well.
Q: Programming all of this in 3D must have been difficult.
T: Technically it wasn't a problem, but the sheer quantity was a headache.
The maps in Xenogears were done in 3D, so generally speaking it had three
times the graphic data to deal with over 2D games. Xenosaga has about
three times more data than that. In the beginning we had the mechs walking
on the maps themselves, but the units are too big and the map data
would've become too much to deal with.
INTERVIEW
PART - FOUR>>>
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