GR: Do you think that games are influencing the way movies are made now? The opening scene of Casino Royale is reminiscent of games - he's hopping from platform to platform. Do you think that games are giving back to movies now that they've reached that cinematic level?
HK: I feel like it's reciprocal - always going back and forth. Movies influence games and in turn, movies influence games again. It's just a cycle.
GR: What's noticeable, particularly with Devil May Cry 4 is the widescreen framing - if you look at it right now [as Kobayashi demonstrates the game] the shots seem almost framed, as if a cinematographer picked it. Is it important to make the game cinematic, like it's been shot like a film, as you play it?
HK: The difficult point of making games is that, unlike a movie where you just have to focus on how things look from one angle, you have to focus on how things look from all around in 360 degrees. So we are putting a lot of effort into how things look from all vantage points.
Even in the poses, it has to look good from all around. So when we're deciding on which pose to use - unlike in the movie where you have to look good from one angle - it has to look good all the way around. So we are considering those factors. We have a lot of talented staff who are constantly thinking about these details.
GR: So this kind of brings us to a question - talking about the cinematic style, and talking about the core gameplay. Which is the most important, which is harder to create? Or are they inseparable?
HK: We focus equally on both. They're not separable.
GR: It does come together, but we would imagine it's very difficult to balance that in development. Could you talk about that?
HK: We do get balanced by dividing out parts of the game into like a point system - where one element we might say it has to be 70 points out of 100, but another element that has to be 80 points out of 100. But in the end, if it combines to a total score... basically, overall we put certain priorities on certain things. But if the total score is to our liking, then we go with it.
