Mag-log in bilang miyembro
Sa eksklusibong pakikipanayam na ito, si Goichi Suda (Suda51) ay nakaupo sa amin upang talakayin ang Romeo is a Dead Man: kung paano binabalanse ng Grasshopper Manufacture ang madulas na labanan na may mas kakaibang mga piraso ng set, ang kuwento ng Romeo / Juliet na tumatakbo nang parallel sa buong space-time, at kung bakit kasama sa laro ang isang retro 2D spaceship hub. Pinag-uusapan din niya ang mga kolaborator sa soundtrack, mga plano sa paglulunsad, at mga potensyal na tumango sa nakaraan (at hinaharap?) Mga proyekto.
"Hi, Gamereactor friends. This is a very special day for me.
Once again, I have the great occasion to talk with a man that I've known for almost 20 years, for many, many, many games, a good old acquaintance of mine, and I dare say, a friend of mine. I will give you a clue, a little clue."
"So, yeah, thank you so much for joining us, Suda-san, once again.
I would have loved to meet you in person. It couldn't happen.
I think we talked for No More Heroes 3 in 2021, if I'm correct, and then we met in 2019, last time, at E3, when E3 was a thing."
"So, first of all, I wanted to ask you, how are you doing?
How are you doing personally?
And also, how excited are you about the release of your new game?
How's it going? We're here in London."
"Unfortunately, we weren't able to make it to Spain, but yeah, we're doing okay.
I don't really have so much jet lag, but I have been missing out on some of my beauty sleep.
So, I'm a bit tired, but other than that, doing great and excited for the game coming out.
All right, we are excited as well."
"I've been playing a little bit of Romeo is a Dead Man, up until, I think, a little bit after the first boss.
What a crazy game. Of course, this would be stating the obvious with you.
Do you think you found the perfect balance in your trademark Grasshopper Manufacturer style, the perfect balance between very satisfying combat and zany scenarios?
Yeah, I'm really happy to hear that you've been enjoying it so far, and that you feel that we've got that balance."
"I personally feel that we have found that perfect balance between the kind of typical messed up Grasshopper bosses and the crazy-ass scenarios.
You said you've gotten just past the first boss.
From here on out, stuff gets even weirder, and all kinds of cool shit happens."
"So, I'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say.
Once you get a bit further in the game, and hear your thoughts on how things turn out, what pops up, stuff like that.
Yeah, I've been running around the spaceship, and I'm now in the next chapter.
But before asking you about the spaceship, I wanted to ask you about the plot and the scenario that we just mentioned, and working with Ren Yamazaki, who, of course, worked with you on TSA: Travis Strikes Again."
"There's a lot of references to your previous work, in terms of the plot, with the aliens and sci-fi, and clashing dimensions, and the weird love story going on here.
What do you guys want to convey with this new twist to your trademark narrative, together with Ren Yamazaki?
I guess, put as simply as possible, what we wanted to do with the story and the scenario this time is basically two things."
"First, we've got the main character, Romeo, who starts out as a regular dude, gets mixed up in all this stuff, and all kinds of things happen. He goes on an adventure.
Part of it's the story of Romeo's adventure, and the story of Romeo growing up and developing into the man, or the dead man that he's going to become."
"The other part of the story is the story between Romeo and Juliet.
I'm not sure if you could call her the heroine of the story, but she's the Juliet of the Romeo and Juliet of the story, obviously.
How does their relationship turn out? What exactly is up with Romeo and Juliet?
Do they work things out in the end? What happens to Romeo in the end?
Is he able to grow into himself and find himself?
Those two things are progressing simultaneously."
"The story of Romeo himself, and the story of Romeo and Juliet.
Put really simply, that's what we wanted to portray in this scenario.
Can you tell me a little bit more about Juliet?
Without getting into spoiler territory, we're going to see different versions of Juliet."
"I think we can say this. Very twisted, very different versions of Juliet.
Same as we see other bad guys in the story.
What else can you tell us or tease us about these different Juliets we're going to be meeting throughout the adventure?
I hope this is a good enough answer to your question."
"If not, then let me know and I'll add more.
You've got Romeo and Juliet, which is obviously the Shakespeare thing.
I feel that if you play the game for about 10 minutes or so, it's going to become pretty apparent pretty quickly that this is not the same story as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
The different versions of Juliet you mentioned."
"There are basically different variants of Juliet that exist in or are from different, I guess the simplest way to put it would be different dimensions or different parts of space-time.
You've got the FBI space-time police, which Romeo joins up with.
He finds out that Juliet and or some of her variants have apparently caused some sort of extreme space-time crime."
"She's basically a space-time fugitive as are her variants.
So Romeo and the space-time police, they've got to track her down and find out what her deal is too.
Find out exactly what it is she did, how and why she did it.
That's pretty much the really basic breakdown of what Juliet is about in the game."
"Is that an appropriate answer?
Yes, it's fantastic. I'm looking forward to learning more about her and her different transformations.
I want to ask you about the spaceship because I find it very entertaining.
There's a ton of things to do in the spaceship."
"We've got mini-games, we've got unlockable weapons, we've got upgrades, we've got food, we've got relatives, we've got friends and also stories to learn about.
For those who don't know, it's all from a top-down, pixelated view.
It's a very interesting hub world to take a look around.
I think it makes an interesting contrast coming from more open-world shenanigans in the past with No More Heroes."
"I wanted to ask you if you feel more comfortable with this retro style coming from Travis Strikes Again and a more indie touch to it instead of trying to follow in the past the trend for open worlds.
We were talking about balance as well.
It feels better for you to be here with all this pixelated content and then the 3D action sequences with Romeo."
"As far as the retro 2D pixel art stuff goes, to be honest, when we first started developing the game, considering the studio that we have now, the members that we have, the things that they're specialised in and good at, the fact that we have a good number of 3D artists and stuff, we didn't originally have any specific plans to add more retro 2D stuff to the game."
"It was going to be mainly, if not all, 3D, full polygon style game.
We started working on it like that for a while.
I believe it was about two years ago.
It came to a point where we were like, okay, we really have to take a good hard look at this project, how far we've come, how much further we have to go, the schedule, the budget."
"We've got to make sure that everything's going to work out.
We realized a couple things.
The first thing was, okay, if we keep going at this rate, we're going to go way over schedule and we're going to go way over budget.
Having a big open world, all 3D game these days, it's expensive and it's also very time consuming."
"We had to sit down and think, all right, how can we change the game without necessarily chopping off huge parts?
How can we not necessarily reduce the game, but change the game to make it more realistic, both schedule-wise and budget-wise?
We spoke to the ideas about it.
I spoke with everyone in the studio about it, the different people heading to different sections and everything."
"We came up with a few ideas.
One of the ideas was, as you mentioned, in TSA, there's different art styles, a lot of retro stuff.
We figured, hey, we've got this studio that we've been running for this long.
A lot of the people here have been here for a long time."
"They've worked on many different styles of games before, both gameplay-wise and visual-wise.
How about we take advantage of the specific skills that these people have and their specialties and put them together?
Not only use that to make the game, to give it a bit more variety and a bit more punch to it, but also, extremely fortunately, that would also help us both schedule and budget-wise as well."
"Instead of just chopping off parts of the game and just adding in some cutie stuff here, which, again, at first, the first time it got brought up, there were actually a few people who didn't want to do it because they thought, oh, people are going to think it's going to look cheap.
They're going to think that it looks kind of shitty."
"When we really started coming up with concrete ideas, that's when a lot more people started getting into it.
Okay, let's make this part 8-bit, 16-bit art, whatever.
Let's make this part a bit more retro-looking.
Instead of having this part be just full-on 3D polygon graphics, let's change it so it's more like this."
"All these ideas, they started coming together really well.
A lot of it just happened to work out really well.
A lot of it worked out because of the amount of time and effort that went into it.
Making sure that it would fit well with the game and it wasn't just cutting corners."
"As you mentioned, a lot of that came from TSA and the experiences that we had on that game.
The fact that a lot of people that worked on that game, they were happy to return back to that style and go back to some of the things that we'd worked on a long time ago and incorporate that into our newest title.
I have to say, it doesn't look cheap at all. I didn't mean to say that."
"Actually, from what I've played, if I have to highlight something about the game so far, it is the graphic design and the way you guys combine a lot of techniques.
You have Western comic, you have anime, you have, as you said, 16-bit.
8-bit graphics, you have 3D, but with quirky colors."
"You have collage, you have a stop motion in the Michael Jackson video style.
I'm absolutely loving the art and the visuals so far.
But I wanted to ask you about the soundtrack.
Because, of course, that's also a staple with Grasshopper games, to have bangers and a fantastic soundtrack."
"I remember you in the past telling me that you were into the Arctic Monkeys.
And I also remember sharing with you a very special gig in LA with Yamaoka-san for Let It Die.
So what can you tell me about the sort of the inspirations and the bands that worked with you in this fantastic soundtrack?
As far as the soundtrack and the music in general goes, we started off with our own sound team here at Grasshopper, working out the basics."
"Okay, we want to have this general vibe, you know, this kind of sound, maybe these kinds of tracks.
They put together the foundation for most of it.
And then from then on, we went and got a bunch of really awesome artists.
That were cool enough to participate and to lend us their abilities."
"For one thing, we've got Nobuaki Kaneko, who has worked on our past games on No More Heroes 3.
And we've got another group called Luby Sparks.
They got a couple of tracks in there...
called Luby Sparks, a Japanese shoegazer band. They've got a couple tracks in there."
"We've got, okay, Luby Sparks does the opening song, and then for the the title screen, we've got a Japanese hip-hop artist named BLYY who did that for us. Also there's a part of the game, it's, I guess you could call it a kind of dungeon part. The music for that part was done by Cody Carpenter, who's director John Carpenter's Son. We've also got one or two other artists who are participating in the soundtrack, who we're keeping under wraps for now."
"So once the game actually goes live, we're looking forward to seeing what people think about the soundtrack in general, and we're hoping you guys dig the lineup that we have.
Another guy we've got is a guy named Jasper Byrne, who he did a lot of the, if not all of the soundtrack for Hotline Miami. He also put in a lot of work for us as well."
"Fantastic. Another thing I wanted to ask you about, of course we, as I said, we go back a a long time, a long way. We met when you were developing the first No More Heroes for the Wii, circa 2007 I think, and of course you've always been very close to the Nintendo community, and I know you've mentioned already that you guys are taking a look at the Switch 2 and the possibilities of bringing Romeo is a Dead Man to the platform, but I also know that some studios are waiting for the Unreal Engine to be more compatible with the platform. So I don't know what's the status. If you are still looking into it, when can we expect to learn more about this potential version? Of course Romeo is a Dead Man is going to release on February the 11th on PS5 and Xbox Series. So what can you tell me about this? Yeah, we really do want to put the game out on the Switch 2. We're at the moment, we're kind of right in the middle of trying to work out a whole bunch of different things. We're trying to figure out what we can do to make that happen, one way or another. We're investigating several different possibilities, I guess you could say, and that's something, if possible, we definitely want to do. Also this may come up in a later question, but another thing that a lot of people have been asking for is a physical version of the game. Of course. For various platforms. That's another thing that we're currently looking into different avenues for. Another thing that, if possible, we would definitely like to do as well. So yeah, well we can't make any promises or give any kind of deadlines or anything yet. But getting it on the Switch 2 somehow and if possible getting out physical versions. We're seeing everybody's comments, we're hearing everyone's voices. We're totally working on that. That would be fantastic with a beautiful art that you have to put it on a printed version. Let me ask you about collaborations. You've worked with different Japanese developers and global artists in the past, as we've mentioned with the music, but we've always loved your collaborations. For example with Swery-san very recently, with Mikami-san in the past. And now that we were talking about physical art, I recalled that I met Darick Robertson last year, who of course illustrated one of the covers for No More Heroes 3. So is there something that you would like to tell us about these potential collaborations perhaps in the near future that you're thinking about, that you would like to work with some, for example, Japanese developers or global artists? Yeah, one person in particular would be Dennis Wedin, the creator of Hotline Miami. I've known him for a while. We've been talking about this for a long time, about doing something together, collaborating somehow."
"He does some great art. I think we could do something really cool if we'd have Dennis do the art for the game and I'd act as game designer.
Who knows if it'll happen or how long it would take to happen. But again, that's something we've been discussing for a long time, about finally getting together and doing something at some point. So I'd love to work with him in the near future. I'm pumped about that already, fantastic. Okay, I now have a brief, quick questions. So if you want to like more, let's give this a little bit more rhythm and pace, but perhaps you want to elaborate, up to you. I've seen a lot of references to, of course, to the No More Heroes world in this game so far. So can we expect some sort of crossover? Is there something from the world of No More Heroes appearing in this game? There is something. That's a quick answer."
"Fantastic. Also, I've seen clear references to the Kill the Past trilogy, and of course, that involves Killer7 as well. And we've seen Kamiya-san* recover the Okami project.
So would you like to do the same with Killer7?
Well, as far as Killer7 in particular goes, as you probably know, that IP is only by Capcom, so we can't just go and do whatever we want with it, you know. There was a little bit of Killer7 in Travis Strikes Again. At that time, that was sort of, I guess you could say it was sort of a gift from Capcom. Like, well, you know, it's Grasshopper's 25th anniversary, so okay, we'll let you have this one, you know. So if we were going to do something with Killer7 again, then it would probably have to be another special occasion, like, you know, Grasshopper's 30th anniversary or something like that. So at the moment, we don't have any concrete plans to do something like a Killer7 sequel or like a remake, right?
No, no, no, I love every answer so far, actually. But I don't think you mentioned this, so perhaps it would be easier to come back to No More Heroes with a No More Heroes 4."
"Is that something that you would like to do? I'm asking too much about the future. Sorry about that.
I have no idea. You sound a lot like Travis.
And the final one. We ate sushi in No More Heroes 3 and we are cooking curry in Romeo is a Dead Man. Why do I suck at cooking curry? What's the key to sort of make curry right?
Because I'm terrible so far. I always get the D grade."
"This is the first. Even I wasn't able to do it very well. I kept getting these and stuff myself.
It was really difficult. You had to get everything like exactly right to get like a good grade.
Yeah. But maybe try again and keep trying because we've actually adjusted a bit because it was just simply too damn hard. And everyone was like, why is this so damn hard? I can't get a good grade."
"But if you try again and maybe like practice a couple of times, you should definitely be able to reach A or maybe even S. Honestly, probably not S because S is still hella hard to get.
All right.
But you should be able to at least reach A relatively more easily than before. So yeah, definitely try it out again."
"I will give it my best. All right. I mean, thank you so much for this time. Arigatō gozaimasu.
I'm looking forward to playing the rest of Romeo is a Dead Man before its release on February the 11th. Enjoy your time in London. I hope we meet in person again soon enough. So again, thank you so much. Gracias."
