Q&A
Question about the 3DS lineup–it’s all of Nintendo’s big core franchises in an attempt to get to those core fans. But looking at the original DS lineup, he wonders which approach is better.
Miyamoto: Actually we made Nintendogs before Mario, so that’s kind of a strange pattern for us.
I think as long as we have Nintendogs in the lineup that perhaps your mother and grandmother will have something to purchase and play in the lineup as well.
I think what’s maybe different this time is that a lot of the experiences we’ve had that are casual are sort of already included in the system (such as the camera and Face Raiders for instance).
So since the DS introduced a new play style, we felt as though we needed to introduce that new style to the audience through the games. But with 3DS, it’s really trying to bring a more core experience to the system, so it’s different.
Our development teams–and myself included–are working on some more expanded/casual titles, but we will be announcing those later.
Next question I actually missed. It is about the differences between boys and girls when creating games.
Miyamoto: I really don’t think of it all that differently. I can say that when we created the original Star Fox, one of our goals was to take a sort of male-oriented dream–and that is, the ability to fly a jet fighter–and bring that to fruition.
Koizumi mentions that when making Galaxy, the little boy in him made him want to fly through space . But the Super Mario game that they’re working on now is the Super Mario that is familiar to everyone, and is not coming from the little boy in anyone.
Is Skyward Sword Nintendo’s last game for the Wii?
From my perspective, I feel one of my biggest responsibilities is to be developing for the newest and upcoming platforms. So from my team’s perspective, it may not be the last, but it’s one of the last. But there are a lot of other developers still working on titles which have not been announced for Wii. Those are still on the way.
At the very least, SS is the title that sort of celebrates 25 years of Zelda, so we really wanted to make it the kind of game that we could close the chapter with.
So one of the things that we’ve been doing is that I told Aonuma-san that if this wasn’t the best Zelda ever, then maybe we’d be done making Zelda games (laughter). And I told the Star Fox producer that with SF64 3-D that if we can’t reconvince people that it’s a fun game to play, that maybe it’ll be the last Star Fox.
I played a Mario 3-D game recently and it seems the pacing is a little different than Galaxy, etc. What sort of tweaks have you made to this game?
3-D games until now have really had to do their best to orient the player, and sometimes that means changing the speed of the game. This time, I wanted to maintain the speed and the accuracy of the control to give the player a very Mario experience.
Koizumi: Still there will be parts of the game that are very challenging for some players. But I hope you will get through it.
(Last question). I was wondering what happened to the Wii Vitality Sensor (laughter).
So development on that has continued, but what we found is that the device sometimes has a hard time performing consistently in a variety of different environments. So because of this we don’t feel that it’s ready to release, but we are going to continue working on it and researching the idea to see if we can’t incorporate it into something else.
(Just one more last last question.) Question about whether the Tanooki Suit power-up will have the flight ability and what the development thought process was on this–as well as where the whole flight mechanic came from in the first place.
Koizumi: So it’s true that Mario was able to fly with this suit in the past games, but I believe there was another type of Mario which had a tail and ears which could not fly–and that was Racoon Mario (?)–so that is what we wanted to incorporate in this game.
Miyamoto: As for the question about what brought this about to begin with, I think what we should do is bring in Takashi Tezuka (director of Mario 3) to answer this for you personally.
So we started off wanting to give Mario a tail so that he could use a spin move to attack enemies. But once he had the tail, we thought, well, isn’t there something else we could do with this tail? So at first we sort of had him flutter his tail back and forth and slow his descent… but this felt so good, we eventually just said, oh, let’s just make him fly. (Laughter and applause ensues.)
Miyamoto wants to mention that this is also the 10th anniversary of Luigi’s Mansion.
But that means there is also one more game which is celebrating a 10th year anniversary.
I really did want to release Pikmin this year. It is a Wii game that we have been working on. But as we have been working on the Wii U hardware and I have been looking at those beautiful HD graphics and working on that fancy controller, I am getting more and more convinced that I want to see Pikmin on that hardware. It’s the perfect system for Pikmin. So we’re going to make it for that one.
And I guess what I can say about that is that since we’ve been working on it for Wii for a while, maybe it won’t be too long before it’s available for Wii U.
The one issue is that we’ve shown the structure of the Wii U gameplay, but we actually haven’t announced any titles we’re devleoping for it yet.
So one side of this whole not announcing games yet for the next system is definitely important. But the other side of me just really wants to tell you that we are developing Pikmin for Wii U.
We’d like to thank Nintendo and all involved for once again inviting us to this exclusive event. We’ll have even more tomorrow from a second roundtable–and no one yet knows the details… just that it’ll involve “a Nintendo third-party developer”. Stay tuned.