Interviews// Anarchy Reigns: Platinum Games' Atsushi Inaba

If there’s one thing that Platinum Games knows, it’s how to cause chaos. From Bayonetta to Madworld and Vanquish, the studio of former Capcom luminaries has brought constant destruction and screen-filling madness. Now in its fifth project with SEGA, producer Atsushi Inaba is trying to tackle the online multiplayer space. With lashings and lashings of chaos, naturally.

Anarchy Reigns. The clue is in the name, really. You just know it’s going to be a game full of ridiculously cool set-pieces and devastation by hearing about it in conversation. Essentially, it’s a third-person fighting game in the style of a post-apocalyptic Battle Royale. Almost everyone is a cyborg or otherwise enhanced with some kind of augmented technology, and the world around you destroys itself whilst you’re busy smacking several opponents around the head with special moves.

It all sounds a bit like Bayonetta, doesn’t it? But when I sat down to speak with Inaba-san, I learned after the hands-off presentation that the mechanics and control systems have had to be toned down drastically for maximum enjoyment.

“Anarchy Reigns is a very different game to Bayonetta, so it might be fairer to say that it could be compared to more traditional fighting games out there,” Inaba-san said. “But there will always be more than one enemy to deal with, so you need an easy way to execute commands when there are enemies in front and behind you.

"It wouldn’t be fair for the user to master all these intricate systems for special combos, so we simplified a lot of it compared to other, traditional fighters. I’d say the complexity of combat is somewhere between other brawlers out there and Bayonetta, yes.”

Of course, Platinum Games contains a number of SEGA fans within, and so the continuation of the relationship between the two companies must be quite exciting for the team. Indeed, the studio has been known to throw in several references to and draw inspiration from past SEGA arcade games. So Streets of Rage wasn’t in mind when Anarchy Reigns came to Inaba-san’s mind?

“We don’t actually have any references to Streets of Rage or any other SEGA games, but the concept of the game was pretty simple - we wanted to show very unique interesting and interesting characters and try to update the brawling game genre. In fact, creating an online game was the first thing we thought of doing when it came to developing this game, so a fighting game seemed like a natural fit for this.”

During the presentation, Inaba-san noted that online games in today’s age has been associated with the first-person shooter, and that he wanted to change that perception. Despite this, a number of shooters were explored by Platinum Games to assess how different it would be to create a close-quarters combat game over the internet.

“In FPS games you’ll be hiding behind cover most of the time, shooting enemies from afar. You have a very good distance between you and your opponent. In this game, everything happens so fast in a small, confined area. So in terms of game design we didn’t learn directly from shooters, but in terms of how different this genre would be and the concept of replay values, we did learn a lot in that regard.”

The characters you’ll get to control range from the insane (Sasha is an ice queen who freezes opponents with a detachable blade called Snow Spikes) to the super-insane (Big Bull is a cybernetic half-man, half-bull character that lugs around a massive hammer). But there’s time for a cameo or two as well - Jack Cayman from Madworld makes a more colourful appearance as a playable character, and the Baron from the Wii brawler also returns as the Black Baron - “blacker, badder and bigger,” according to Inaba-san.

As you tackle your enemies against burning city backdrops, a number of special events will take place that can help change the outcome of the battle. Sequences called Action Trigger Events (ATEs) will result in an arena-wide disaster taking place that will take you and your opponents out if you’re not careful. Examples include skyscraper-high tsunamis, a carpet bombing from the military, air strikes and collapsing bridges - with that last one proving to cause a change to the nature of the map as well as each character’s wellbeing.

You can also pick up a special item in the game, and use it to engage in a special one-on-one duel between a specific opponent. During this time the gameplay switches from a Battle Royale style to more of a Tekken arena to focus on just you and your chosen rival. Inaba-san didn’t explain anything beyond this point - whether other players could intervene or if the action elsewhere would be paused during this time - but he acknowledged that trying to bring all these different elements together makes for a challenging time for the studio’s very first online title.

“It hasn’t been so challenging in terms of platform environments, really. We’ve had a lot of great first party support for Xbox Live and PlayStation Network - lots of technical help and information regarding the libraries, recommendations and so on. The more challenging this was to make the game itself run well without any problems.

"Everything is happening at a close range - this is a fighting game as opposed to a shooting one, so it all happens in one place at the same time. You could get away with a couple of glitches in a shooter because there’s a lot more distance involved, but we can’t get away with that same approach. It has to be absolutely perfect, and that is the hardest challenge for us.”

This is as far as Inaba-san will go before refusing to reveal any more details on the game - “more colourful arenas” are promised, opportunities for opponents to engage in co-operative play mid-match will be present and I was teased that the largely single-player Story Mode will have some form of co-operative multiplayer action to spice it up.

But one thing Inaba-san certainly wouldn’t talk about is the possibility of any other SEGA cameos - “I cannot say any more because if I do SEGA will kill me,” the producer says with a chuckle. I think, given Platinum Games’ track record, the studio could put up a good fight if the publisher tried anything though.