Interviews// Akai Katana: Hiroyuki Kimura & Hideki Nomura

This twist of two cultures - the Japanese spirit and the Western calamities of war - is present in another of CAVE’s sleeper hits - NIN2-JUMP, a quirky platformer that the studio self-published onto Xbox Live Marketplace earlier this year. Kimura, as one of the developers behind the title, revealed a rather different kind of inspiration for this besides animation.

“Actually, NIN2-JUMP was aimed at the overseas audience. We wanted to realise that mistaken, stereotypical image of Japan that exists internationally, and see what we could do with it. In that sense we created a world setting that was a natural mistaken impression of our country - made the ninja very strong too, like Superman,” Kimura laughs. “He has all these tough expressions and things, and generally we took into account some popular designs from overseas and mixed them with a goofy Japanese design. I think it’s a pretty funky and crazy game.”

Kimura’s work on Akai Katana Shin marks his directorial debut for CAVE console ports, and although he was not involved with the development of the arcade version he still has a lot of respect for the game and takes pride in the fact that this update remains faithful in many ways to the 2010 original. Chief of these accomplishments include a high definition graphical reworking and a widescreen display.

In particular, the presentation of the game was something that was dear to Kimura’s heart throughout development of the port. “This might surprise you, but we didn’t worry so much about slowdown and other technical hiccups during the port,” he said, noting that the Xbox 360’s power was vastly improved over the weaker processing power of the arcade board used.

“We spent the most time working on things that weren’t in the original game.” Here, Kimura is referring to the tweaked game modes present in the console port - ‘Shin’ and ‘Zetsu’ (which I’m told will be renamed for the European release when Rising Star Games publish it early next year). “We really didn’t want to just throw a lot of bullets at the player. Obviously, that’s a part of almost every CAVE game, but we also wanted to have a lot of score items on the screen.”

These modes will feature twists and gimmicks to the straightforward shoot’em up play that the studio were simply not able to implement in the arcade version due to the limitations of the board, Kimura explains. But what is he most proud of? “The menus - or as I like to call them, the ‘God-like’ menus of Akai Katana Shin,” he says with a massive grin. “We really threw our backs behind that. Our priority was raising the overall level of the package itself, so we hope that overseas users appreciate that as well.”

Despite the improvements, he reveals that it wasn’t much of a challenge to adapt the shooter for the home console. “When we were developing Akai Katana for the arcade, we also had certain things in mind for the eventual console port as well,” he said, highlighting a culture shift within CAVE itself. As a result of this platform consideration, Kimura added that the arcade release actually had a lower difficulty setting compared to some other CAVE shooters, and also came complete with a complicated game system.