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One of the game’s keywords is “awakening”. Can you elaborate on that? "The original instructions I gave the team, including Murashu, were extremely simple – “Produce an awakening that will make the game look like it was done on different hardware.” The first game was fun to play, but I wanted them to awaken those dormant “elements” enough to make people do a double take after seeing this sequel. What exactly they should do with the world, the coloring, the modeling, and so on, I left up to them. We’d decided from early on that the awakening aspect of the gameplay would include taking the one-on-one battles of the first game and turning them into one versus many, as well as heavily refining the camera angles during the battles. All that took about a year. "The team seemed to have a lot of trouble getting the visuals right. The background unit looked at a lot of sci-fi films and anime for ideas, but it took them a while to find the right look. The multiple-enemy battles also caused problems for the backgrounds, as they place a lot of restrictions on things like texture storage space. You need that visual impact, though, so they went through a lot of trial and error to get it right. I thought they could use a bit of help, so I told them to try a toon-shaded look. Eventually they came up with a new technique that isn’t quite toon shading or regular shading, but what we call ZOE shading. I was happy with how it looked. The only thing is, the backgrounds don’t stand out as much that way. When the current ZOE shading was nearly finished, I told them to completely forget about toon shading (laughs). “If you have to reduce the number of enemies to fix the backgrounds, there won’t be any awakening,” I said. There was a lot of confusion regarding the visuals throughout the game’s development. I guess it was at the start of 2002 when we brought [Takashi] Mizutani, who was in charge of MGS’s cut-scenes, and [Shigeo] Okajima, from MGS’s effects unit, onto Anubis. The visuals became what we have in the game today after Mizutani began making changes to the surfaces and coloring, and Okajima added certain unrealistic anime-ish effects." It looks like anime fans will be pleased. "People often talk about the fusing of 2D and 3D, but back when we started experimenting with toon shading, I guess it was, we decided we wanted to make the visuals actually feel like that, to put real substance behind such words. What we did first was to have [Nobuyoshi] Nishimura draw storyboards for us, as he used to be an anime animator. He’d say things like, “This is what an explosion would look like in anime, for instance, if you were showing it from this angle in a battle scene.” He drew a lot of storyboards, which we then showed to everyone on the team. They would ask him things like, “What would we need to do to make this look like such and such?” and he’d figure out what needed to be done. It took a while to get everything right, but eventually everything gelled and we have what you see today. The smoke, for example, might be slightly different from anime smoke, but it’s still very close. As for the cut-scenes, we’d planned from the beginning to do them in anime. The thought of having the characters’ faces in real time scared me (laughs). Rather than calling Anubis an anime, what we wanted to express is Anubis the game. We wanted to maintain all the enjoyment only a game can deliver. We’d like anime fans to pay attention to all the anime-like elements while keeping in mind they’re playing a game." ————————————————— |