Following the Genei Ibun Roku #FE developer interview about the game’s origins in Nintendo Dream magazine last month, the April 2016 edition of Nintendo Dream magazine released on February 20th features a new interview for the game, which Nintendo Everything has translated.
The developers interviewed are from the previously released interview:
- Hitoshi Yamagami (Nintendo producer)
- Shinjiro Takada (Atlus producer)
- Kaori Ando (Nintendo director)
- Eiji Ishida (Atlus director)
- Mitsuru Hirata (Atlus chief director)
- Fumitaka Yano (Atlus art director)
They discuss the setting of Shibuya in the game, initial design ideas for the main character, and design ideas they had for the battle scene aesthetic of Genei Ibun Roku #FE.
Shibuya
- Much detailed location scouting was held to accurately reproduce the setting of Shibuya in Genei Ibun Roku #FE, down to the position of the crossings and of the shops. The scale was reduced while attempting to maintain Shibuya’s impression.
- There are developers in the team who just worked on the location of Shibuya in the game for 1-2 years.
- The Side Stories in the game were initially implemented within the main story, but playtesting and pacing issues pushed the developers to disassociate those segments of the game from the main story.
Main Character
- The main character Itsuki Aoi was designed to be an ordinary person so that he may learn from the world of show business alongside the player.
- Itsuki was initially designed to have a manager role for the other characters.
ND: A manager!?
Ishida: Well, Itsuki is a rare main character for an Atlus game as he is relatively active in chats, so perhaps a protagonist like, “I’ll become a rock star!”, would have worked as well.
ND: If Itsuki-kun was a character like that, the image would change quite bit.
Ishida: Yes. But the player takes part as Itsuki in the game, so I thought it would be better to have a character who has a bit closer point of view [to the player] so that you can project yourself, rather than having a grand dream which is quite remote for the player. Therefore we thought along the lines of a manager or a producer, but even that is a bit different, I think.
Combat Aesthetic
- The reasoning behind characters getting money as a result from battling was “ohineri” (coin offering wrapped in paper) as a prize for a good show.
Yano: When talking about the performance direction, we had more ideas in the beginning. There were things like a battle starting with a clap of a clapperboard by an assistant director.
Ishida: We even had a 3D stage assistant character.
Yano: But when we tried making that, the direction was too long as you’d expect, so it was scrapped.
Everyone: (laughs)
Ishida: We also had an idea of the camera flying a lot around the battle stage, but it mixed things up, so too troublesome things were removed and in the end it turned out in this form. There was also a system in which booing occurs on failures, but that simply isn’t pleasant while playing, so it makes you give up (laughs).
Read the full interview on Nintendo Everything.
Genei Ibun Roku #FE (translated as Illusory Revelations #FE and previously known as Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem) was released on December 26, 2015 in Japan for the Wii U. It will release in North America in 2016.