A Moment With Tomonobu Itagaki
- March 05, 2004 15:05 PM PST
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The producer of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball looks back on his latest game. Why did preschoolers get to play it before you did?
Although it'll be a little while before the sales figures start rolling in, Tecmo's Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball has already succeeded in becoming the object of desire for male gamers of a certain age all over the world. It's obvious why, too: no Japanese company knows what the typical Xbox user likes quite as well as Tecmo, and nobody at Tecmo knows more about girls and "bouncing" than Team Ninja and its leader, Tomonobu Itagaki.Itagaki's personal devotion to DOAX?he came up with the design, oversaw its production, and even wrote the instruction manual himself?is almost scary, especially considering the somewhat loopy idea behind the game. In this interview (originally published in this week's issue of Famitsu magazine), Itagaki discusses what went into the lady animation, what got left out of the game, and how he came up with all this in the first place. Read on?hopefully you aren't offended by discussion about the female body.
Itagaki on Lisa: "You must play as Lisa in order to access the really raunchy swimsuits. Some of them cost up to a million Zack dollars, so hang in there. You should be able to raise that much after around six games of volleyball."
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Tomonobu Itagaki, Team Ninja: Because we had a lot of gamers ask us to include a beach volleyball game as a bonus in our next DOA title. They told us that they wanted to see all the characters wearing swimsuits.
Q: That's how this project got started?
I: Right. That's when we decided to make a beach volleyball game. But then I realized that I didn't really want to make just a volleyball minigame?if I was going to make it, I wanted to make something that could sell itself and keep gamers satisfied just with the volleyball alone. If you count from when I first thought about this, then the project took two or three years. I don't need to tell you this, but the graphics are really beautiful, right? I figured that, with the power of the Xbox, it's time to create our first real girls-in-swimsuits game. It wouldn't be cool if the graphics didn't make the grade, after all.
Q: The girls are very lithe and flexible. Was the Xbox the only machine that could do graphics like this?
I: The female body is built out of a very particular set of curves. When we were making Dead or Alive 3, I realized that the Xbox was capable of taking girls modeled with these curves in mind and animate four of them onscreen at once. That's why we chose the Xbox for our platform this time.
Q: What did you concentrate on when you were making the volleyball part of the game?
I: I guess the "pick up and play" aspect of it. The game looks pretty simple at first glance, but the play structure is actually really deep. I think it's definitely worth diving into.
Q: The two-button control system makes it easy to get into.
I: Our philosophy was basically "the fewer buttons, the better." I actually wanted to have it use only one button, but that was completely impossible. (laughs)
Q: Even though the controls are simple, your team can really do a lot of things. There seems to be a lot of room for strategy; aiming for holes in your opponent's defense and so on. It's fast, too.
I: It is, isn't it? When it comes to speed, we beat out everybody else. (laughs) I'm an impatient guy, so I hate games that don't respond very well. At the same time, though, it's not like we're forcing the tempo along just to keep things fast. Sports games require a lot of hand-eye coordination to play, right? If you can keep the players moving around as quickly as possible, that makes it easier to directly control the action. It's set up so that you can play all right even if you're a little slow on the controls, so everyone can play this game pretty easily.
Q: You can also really get an insight into the relationships between all the characters in DOAX?something I never really felt in previous games.
I: One of the things you never saw in DOA up to now was two characters who didn't like each other make up and become friends. You can see that in this game. Most fighting games leave things like that in the background so it doesn't get in the way of the action, but all of that is very clear in DOAX. Some girls hate it if you bother them all the time, but others get mad if you don?t see them every day; that sort of thing. I'd like to see gamers explore that aspect of it, too.
Q: The character animation can get really sexy in spots. Tell us what you paid attention to while working on the character motion.
I: Throughout the DOA series, all of us on the staff have had a firm desire to make something that goes one step beyond in terms of sex and violence?or comedy, you could even say. I believe that a game has to be fun to play first and foremost?if it's not, then it'll lose out to other forms of entertainment. So first we think about that, then we try to make the graphics and sound as sexy as possible. That was our driving point. Speaking of which, this game received a 17 and over [M] rating in America, right? I guess the game's a little too voluptuous. (laughs)
Q: Well, some of the movies are pretty suggestive?showing girls spreading their legs and straddling trees and things.
I: Those elements were tough to build. We had to make sure everything included an essence of fun, or otherwise it'd be this weird, twisted scene. I really had to put my heart and soul into the decision-making process behind that.
Itagaki on Helena: "This game lets you see Helena in her true light, something you couldn't really get to in the fighting games. Depending on the designer's tastes, her hair ribbon changes each time she puts on a different swimsuit." |
I: We did. (laughs) Creating items really isn't that hard, but there's a huge amount of them in the game, so checking them all was tough. Every swimsuit has to be wearable on every girl in the game, first of all. There are 300 swimsuits and eight characters, so that's 2400 swimsuit patterns right there. In addition to that, we have to animate all of those suits so they looked right in any situation... it was really hard. (laughs)
Q: So you're talking about hundreds of thousands of animations here.
I: Exactly. And it's all in 3D too, so everything has to look right no matter which angle you view it from. The amount of checking we had to do was enormous. Looking at it from an efficiency standpoint, though, we ended up building the character models first, then make the swimsuit models fit around those, instead of the other way around.
Q: Are the models completely different from the ones you used in DOA3?
I: We changed them a lot. There's nothing here that was borrowed from the previous game; the model-display engine was completely rebuilt, too. We never really gave much thought to the curves on a female body in previous games, but everyone's wearing swimsuits here, so these curves were an absolute requirement. That's why we remade everything from scratch.
Q: DOA is pretty well known for the way everyone's breasts bounce (laughs), but they don't seem to bounce as much in this game. Was this done on purpose?
I: Right near the end of development we had a discussion on what to do with the bouncing, and that's when we decided to reduce the bounce to the level you see now. We actually decided on that ten days before the game was due at the duplicators. (laughs)
Q: You worried about it that much? Would making them bounce more be hard to implement in a hurry?
I: That's right. Changing the bounciness is no problem when it comes to character models, but we would've had to check all the swimsuit animations over again. Also, we decided between ourselves to set it so that any women seeing the game would find it amusing but still wouldn't be offended, so we figured that was about the right level to achieve that. A lot of the women who played the beta game thought it was cute, and a lot thought it was a little dirty. Of course, I figure men probably have simpler tastes about these things. (laughs)
Q: What else did women have to say about the game?
I: Well, just within our company, a lot of the people who thought up the swimsuit designs were actually women. Most of the really extreme designs were done by women. (laughs) Women have a lot more knowledge and sense about these things than men, after all. I realized this during development, but this game's audience isn't necessarily just men?women can play this game and enjoy it, too, or at least the women around me can. (laughs)
Q: (laughs) So did a lot of these women's opinions get reflected in the game?
I: Yes, a lot of them. We asked what they thought about accessories, how to wear them, and pretty much everything in between. We wanted them to have confidence that we'd put in whatever they brought to us. We even asked a group of preschoolers what they thought of the game.
Q: Preschoolers?
I: We let some kids try out the game. They were all really good at it. (laughs) A lot of them had trouble winning matches after Day 4 in the game, so they just started doing the Hopping Game instead, and that's why you can make money playing the Hopping Game now. (laughs) You were always able to make money from it, but it used to be just a very tiny amount. Thanks to the kids, it's a little higher now.
Q: So the game's economy changed a lot near the end of development as well?
I: Yes. We ended up raising the amount of money you won playing volleyball right near the end, too.
Q: So how are you feeling now that the game's finally out?
I: I'm very satisfied. Our team was able to build everything I wrote in the original project document, so I'm very satisfied. Still, when I look back at it now, I start thinking about how this should be different, or that could've been done better... But I guess I have to make something a little more serious again first. (laughs)
Q: Something in the fighter genre?
I: We'll always be making fighters. I've already thought everything out pretty far into the future. Right now our main objectives are Ninja Gaiden and DOA Code: Cronus. DOA4's in there, too. Of course, whenever we make a bunch of serious games, I start to get an itch to make something silly again. (laughs)
Q: Oh, really? So there's a chance we could see a sequel to DOAX, then, or maybe something different?
I: Well, if we made another DOAX, then we'd have to get Zack back into the fray somehow. If the fans still support Zack strongly enough, then it might just happen. (laughs) But going beyond that, though, there are still a lot of things that'd be fun if you made them into a game, right?
Q: Such as?
I: ...That's a secret for now. (laughs)
