The future of RPGs

Rogue Galaxy and White Knight Story are laid bare as we chat up their creator

Words: Mikel Reparaz, GamesRadar US

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Hino: But the biggest change we made to the game is the game balance. With the Japanese version, we felt that some parts left something to be desired, and that was just truly limited by the development time; we just ran out of time. For the US version, we wanted to basically make a complete version, to realize our original vision of what we originally planned out.

Another improvement we made is to Insectron, which is a mini-game where you collect insects from throughout the galaxy, and you can raise them and grow them and enter them into this tournament called Insectron Tournament. For the Japanese version, it was a single-player experience. But for the US, we actually added a versus mode where users will be able to load their characters into a memory card and play against their friends, or you can actually generate a password which actually has all your insects’ profiles, and either online or whatever you can actually share that information so other people can play against your Insectrons. So with the US version, we incorporated the user comments and opinions we had for the Japanese version, as well as (those of) the staff, (and) what we wanted to do to create this perfect version for the US.

You mentioned earlier that a lot of the stages look completely different. Were the visual changes made with Japanese input in mind, or were they tailored to an American audience?

Hino: It wasn’t really so much to cater to the American audience so much as some of these stages, these dungeons, were so expansive that after a while... [they] started to look a little tedious and monotonous. So in order to avoid that for the US, we wanted to change up the visuals as much as we can throughout the stage, so that as the players explore these areas, there’s always something new.