Nakazato On Lost Odyssey and Future Journeys
By Shawn on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 8:34 PM PST In Game Companies, Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Games, Microsoft, Microsoft
Ray Nakazato, president of the AQI-owned feelplus recently talked with Gamasutra on developing Lost Odyssey and the creation and dissolution of the game’s development team. He also speaks with an insider advantage about the Xbox 360 and Japan.
Nakazato goes into detail about the difficulties involved in using the Unreal 3 Engine for Lost Odyssey. Meshing the engine with developers with a mindset geared towards developing Japanese RPGs was difficult, as was trying to keep up with changes to the engine with few English-speaking engineers. He also spoke of the uncertainty over the use of the Sound Novel concept for the game’s flashbacks.
In Japan, there is a genre called the Sound Novel. It’s like a novel; it’s all text messages. And we were, how do I say — we weren’t sure if it would be accepted well, but it actually was accepted very well, because that writing was very beautiful, and it translated well to other languages.
Feelplus is currently working on Blue Dragon Plus with Final Fantasy and Lost Odyssey creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. According to Nakazato, the company has several smaller projects in the works and hopes to have a more robust offering to announce next year.
via Gamasutra
I enjoyed the game’s flashbacks. I think the gamers who didn’t like it are the type who want everything done for them. They’re playing a game and don’t want to have to use any of their imagination.
As I said, i loved the flashbacks and slowed the pace down of the game nicely to give you some background information of the main character’s extremely long life. I’m not afraid to admit some of the flashbacks brought me to near tears by how powerful the story-telling was.