Interviews// SPOnG Interviews Yoshiki Okamoto

Yoshiki Okamoto is a true videogaming veteran and SPOnG caught up with him in London earlier this week, to talk about PS3, his latest game, Genji: Days of the Blade.

Okamoto-san first joined Konami back in 1981 as an illustrator, moving over to Capcom in 1983, initially to look after the new start-up’s arcade division, he went on to become one of the finest games designers in the world. He’s credited with making some of the finest arcade classics from the 80s, including Gyruss and Time Pilot (for Konami); and, for Capcom, 1942 and a fairly well known beat-em-up franchise you may have heard of called Street Fighter!

Okamoto oversaw all of Capcom’s consumer titles from 1996 onwards, including the Resident Evil and Devil May Cry series. He resigned from Capcom in 2004 and founded his own independent studio, Game Republic, releasing Genji on PS2 in 2005 – based on a classic Japanese historical novel charting the emergence and rise of the Samurai class in feudal 11th-century Japan.

The game was both a critical and commercial success, and, as you would expect from ‘the Street Fighter man’, Genji is rich in parries, combos and super moves, emulating the fighting choreography of classic Samurai films.

The follow up to that title, PS3 launch title,Genji: Days of the Blade releases in Europe on March 23rd (or whenever the PS3 officially releases).

For somebody with the hugely impressive CV outlined above, Okamoto-san is incredibly modest, describing himself to us, as we talked about Streetfighter 2 as ‘just the planner and director of the [that] series’. He also has the best hair in the games industry by a country mile, shaved all over with a sharp fin shooting out of the back so it looks like he’s continually running fast, even though he’s actually standing still. It’s quite something.

SPOnG: OK, we’re here to talk primarily about the latest PS3 version of Genji. You’ve said there is at least twice the amount of content and action in the PS3 version of the game. Can you detail for us what this content consists of?

Yoshiki Okamoto: Basically, the storyline for the game is a lot longer than the first Genji. The first game follows [lead character] Yoshitsune pre-Samurai in his youth period. A lot of it doesn’t actually follow true Japanese history. A lot of it was made along as we made the game.

But, the second part does actually follow history and it covers the entire sort of ‘warriorhood’ of Yoshitsune, up until the end of his story. So it’s quite a long story to follow as well; and the entire range of stories in the game follows throughout the game, from the 1180s onwards.

The initial Genji, in terms of chronological datelines and the events that happen in the story, some of them were not necessarily correct. In this sequel, we’ve kept the stories chronologically correct. Each event happens as it happened in real life history. So obviously the storyline is longer, so there is a lot more in terms of the stages you can play in the game. And obviously we also have double the number of characters, there’s four compared to two… Plus there’s lots more weapons and so on.

SPOnG: Talking about those two new characters in Genji: Days of the Blade – can you outline who they are and what new features they bring to the game?

Yoshiki Okamoto: So in the previous Genji there were two different characters – Yoshitsune and Benkei. Even though they were graphically very different, we received a lot of feedback from fans who thought there wasn’t enough difference between them in terms of the gameplay. So this time around we were able to really differentiate the gameplay elements of each character, so if you have four or five characters that’s really much easier to do. If you think of a graph that – right in the middle it’s well balanced - then you can tweak it in various ways… you know, like this guy is really speedy or really powerful. So we were able to use four different characters in the ways in which fans of the first game really wanted this time around.

For Shizuka, a female crescent blade wielder, the decision was fairly easy. She was a priestess that showed up in the first game and it was an easy choice to bring her in as a player character. She is quite a tricky character to play so she may be a little difficult for non-gamers… she maybe ‘tweaks’ a little towards being a character that more heavy-duty action gamers.

Lord Buson, is a spear-wielding warrior, a character that came around because in the previous game he was one of Yoshitsune's old enemies. But he was very popular in terms of his character design and his fighting skills so we wanted to bring him back, but he had died in the previous game! So we were thinking, ‘hey, what to do? What to do?’ So we had a god take over his body and make him into a good guy! He is more of an all-rounder, a well-balanced character that the not-so-hardcore gamers will be able to use. So he’s a strong offensive character and is able to attack far more easily than the other three characters.