Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm

GR: Will you include American and Japanese language tracks? You’ve been very good with that as of late?

HM: We’re going to be planning to have this game release for the US in October 2008. The US region would actually be the first to actually get their hands on this game. As far as the language portion goes, text-wise, it will actually implement English and French. But for the voiceovers, we actually have English and Japanese voiceovers.

GR: Cool, a lot fans out there prefer the Japanese [voiceovers] with subtitles.

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HM: [Laughs]

GR: What about voice actors - are they the original voice actors?

HM: Yes.

GR: It looks really cool. What would you say is the most exciting thing about the game?

HM: Well one of the main things [in mind] when we actually produced this game was to try and remove the borderline between an anime and actual gameplay. We wanted to kind of reach an effect where when people actually look at this, the start to wonder whether it’s actually game or are they [looking at anime]. So really the visual wall, that appeal that comes from this, is specifically one our one of the points I personally make about the game.

GR: Since the perspective is over the shoulder, behind the back, how will the game present itself when two people are playing?

HM: Well, right now as it stands, our concept of the game was to have a one on one battle. So, basically we made it so that it corresponds in close line, so that you can have essentially depiction of the controlled person and the second controlled player on the same screen and that’s the core concept of how we actually have the people on the screen.

I think that one of the things that we were worried about, was for example, we could have tried to have made more than two player on the same console. But the thing is that we didn’t want to thin out the content of each of the characters and the way their action can be depicted within the game. Which shows one of the decisions why we decided to make it so that there’s basically two controlled characters with both characters onscreen.

GR: How many different characters are there in the game?

HM: Actual battle mode playable characters? 25 characters. And of course we have some other characters that specifically made just for the support characters, too.

GR: You do?

HM: We do. We have plans for some special support characters that I’m sure the fans will be very, very curious about?

GR: Can you tell us who?

HM: The only thing I can say is we do have support specific characters, but…yeah, sorry, we [cannot say]. One other thing… The release date, we’re implying, is still 2008, but that’s still far, far ahead. For the fans who can’t really wait until October we are planning for a some demos of the game which hopefully will be able to give a chance for the all the fans out there for sometime in summer or something and we’ll what we can do as far as how we’ll distribute this for everybody.

GR: Does this mean you guys are looking at the PlayStation Network, possibly?

HM: I can’t really say right now. Sorry.

GR: PSN is a good choice. One other question, for the missions, if you’re playing through the whole one through 135 in the anime, isn’t that a lot of hours? Is the game going to be that long?

HM: Uh, basically although we are kind of reenacting the storylines up to the 135 anime of the series, we’re actually picking out the key areas within the 135, so that it forms a line across from the first to the 135th. Each of those are depicted in missions and each of them are made sufficiently long enough so that it won’t be burdening. So we have that pretty well balanced.

GR: And is there going to be any sort of online leaderboards? As in like some sort of score keeper?

HM: Uh, not for this game series. Basically our online features for the game will primarily be the DLC.

GR: And is the DLC free or is it going to be…?

HM: Sorry. Can’t answer that.

Apr 18, 2008