Ni no Kuni: The Interview

The term Japanese Role-Playing Game (JRPG) is useful shorthand for a certain way of character-led storytelling and combat mechanisms. But there are times when it’s tempting to recognize such rubric as restrictive and embrace games merely as beautiful tales, without cultural baggage. Few people, for example, talk about ‘German Fairy-Tales’.

This suits Level-5 and its ally, animation house Studio Ghibli just fine, as they jointly seek to bring us the wondrous world of Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, translated and localized from a Japanese version launched last year.

Previews of this charming universe offer up an internationalized version of childhood that seems to embrace East and West without discomfort. The combat system, likewise, merges real-time elements with traditional turn-based battles, while adding Pokemon-style use of familiars.

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This isn’t simply aiming for realism, but provides you with a wondrous experience of playing within an anime feature film.

Indeed, the emotional punch offered from early previews of the game, in which main character Oliver moves from a difficult life in an ordinary world, to one that is magical, suggests something that ought to have appeal beyond a segment of gaming that knows or cares about JRPG’s fine and illustrious heritage. That’s a good thing, at least for anyone who seeks to escape the dusty confines of segmentation.

In an email exchange, IGN recently interviewed Level Five’s CEO Akihiro Hino, a programmer, producer and director of dozens of fantasy games. Here’s what he had to say...

IGN: Ni no Kuni is set in a very charming world. What tricks do you use to make this world feel like a living, breathing place?

Akihiro Hino: One of our objectives was to fully utilize the specs of the PS3 to 100 percent  represent our vision of the world of Ni no Kuni, including the artwork and music. One of the most important elements of Ni no Kuni is being able to enjoy Ghibli’s anime, so we put a lot of effort into making it feel like you were freely moving about within an anime feature film.

To make the transition between the hand-drawn anime cut scenes and the game-engine’s real-time cutscenes feel seamless, we adjusted the color tones, the shadowing of people and buildings, and even the minutest detail of character movements so they matched that unique Ghibli anime feel.

Mr. Momose, the director from Studio Ghibli who worked intimately with us on Ni no Kuni, taught us that it was important to portray the “real world” thoroughly before Oliver sets out for the “other world,” in order to make that parallel universe feel real as well. Of course we knew we had to draw the world that formed the background so it felt like it actually existed, but we also put a lot of effort into portraying Oliver’s emotions.

What do you want players to feel as they explore this world? What are the emotions you are hoping to reach?

We would love you to experience the excitement of going on an adventure, as well as the feeling of returning to your childhood, while you play through this game we have prepared for you. Further, it would make us happy if younger players could live out their dreams and the spirit of adventure through this title, as they also think about the importance of their own loved ones, such as their family and friends.

Tell us about working with Studio Ghibli, and the specific and unique qualities they have brought to this project.

It was a great stimulus for us, as well as an experience that helped Level-5’s staff to grow. One of Studio Ghibli’s unique approaches is to ‘properly portray the mundane acts of everyday people.’ Before we learned that, we would tend to move the camera around to create the coolest composition we could envision, or exaggerate the characters’ movements for extra effect. But Mr. Momose only moves the camera about when necessary, and instead composes the scenes so they are easy to view the natural movements of people that he has drawn in detail. On the other hand, if the motion doesn’t look perfectly natural, then they do not show it. Not only does this provide the viewer with a greater sense of realism, but the level of empathy is totally different. This served as a great lesson for us.

Tell us about the creative process of the creature designs, of making these bizarre characters. How do you get from a clean sheet of paper to a newly invented animal?

We took each map area’s characteristics into consideration as we thought about what kinds of creatures would appear in similar places within a Ghibli world, as we carefully crafted each of their designs.

One of the fun factors of Ni no Kuni is the ability to win over wild creatures so they become your pet-like “familiars” that you can then raise up. So we tried to prepare as much variety as possible in the look and personality of the individualistic creatures in order for you to want to collect them. There are well over 350 different types to discover, so we hope you will find your favorites to build your own unique team.

What innovations do you think you have brought to the combat system?

We fused action elements in with a command-based system. Here in Japan, command battles are pretty much mainstream as a lot of people like that kind of system, but we took the preferences of our Western player-base into consideration too, and implemented action elements such as the ability to move your friends and familiars freely around the battlefield.

The dev team reworked the system over and over in order to achieve the best balance between both elements. Also the huge number of creatures that appear in the battles all have their own peculiar motions, so we hope you have fun seeing them. We went to a lot of trouble in try to create a unique battle experience like no other.

Some in the West argue that the JRPG is in a state of crisis. Do you think this is true?

If pushed, I’d say Japanese RPGs tend to cater to players who are not skilled at action games and prefer to have command systems that allow them time to strategize, as well as those who enjoy stories that are similar to reading novels.  So for fans of Western RPG, such JRPGs might seem somewhat antiquated.

In Ni no Kuni, we used some cutting-edge technology to help create a game that isn’t simply aiming for realism, but provides you with a wondrous experience of playing within an anime feature film.

Would you say that Ni No Kuni attempts to re-imagine JRPGs, or does it seek to bring back what was best about this genre, when it was more popular?

Ni no Kuni is a title that cherishes the so-called fundamentals that makes RPGs interesting. Perhaps you will find this orthodox approach a refreshing change from the many overly-individualistic titles that make up the bulk of the market in recent years.

We have included elements that create the true charm of RPGs in abundance: the excitement of stepping foot into a new area of the map; the sense of achievement from clearing tough battles and missions; the joy of exploration or discovering new items; the mixed emotions of meeting and then parting ways with a huge array of characters, and so on.

So perhaps it actually could be considered a restoration or reformation of an RPG from the good old days.

Can you tell us about player-choice and challenges to linearity?

Our work extends from the fundamental desire to allow the player to freely enjoy the feel of the world. That is, not just reading a story in order to proceed like in a novel or movie, but to experience the freedom of actively participating in a way that only a game can provide.

In Ni no Kuni, the main story is one set course, but it is made in a way so you are free to explore the world as you see fit, and when you enter a new area, there is always something to discover there. So you can stray off the beaten path to your heart’s content in order to see all this game has to offer.

Of course you can quickly proceed through the story if you like, but we have set up stage devices at every turn that entice you to get side tracked. In fact we’d be happy for you to complain that you never seem to be making progress in the story because you are too busy exploring the world.

Tell us about translation and localization. Is this an easy, straightforward process or does it have challenges that gamers might not realize?

Ni no Kuni was a massive localization challenge. On top of the large amount of text, approximately a million Japanese characters, and voice overs, we had the 352 page Wizard’s Companion to translate and lay out for both digital inclusion within the game and for physical printing. There are many puzzles and other interactions between the Wizard’s Companion and the game itself, which required a lot thought put into them in each language, such as the creation of the Nazcaän alphabet.

Further, many of the anime scenes had to be redrawn to fix language and setting issues. Even the motions had to be tweaked, from retiming the comedy sketch scenes for maximum comic effect, down to minor motion capture changes like making Oliver bow in a Western fashion.

For the English voice overs, the translators decided to use a split of American English and British English along with its many regional dialects, which require time to perfect. This meant we needed to cast actors who could convincingly pull off the two accents. The English audio also used child actors for some of the main characters and theme song, which added further complexity to the recording process.

There is also a lot of technology going on behind the scenes to make the text as natural as possible, such as font resizing on the fly, as well as a complex system that handles English and European languages’ grammar, including German cases/declension. Hopefully you won’t even notice this because the text will seem perfectly natural to you, as if it was originally written in your language and not a translation from Japanese.

Looking at our finished product, we feel this attention to detail was worth it, and hope you will be blissfully ignorant of these changes as you enjoy the game.

Colin Campbell interviews and writes about games pretty much every weekday. For updates and commentary, follow on Twitter or at IGN. Most recent articles have been on porn in games, historical slavery and the golden age of gangsters.

Source : ign[dot]com