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Way of the Warriors

As a fighting game, Persona 4: The Ultimate in Mayonaka Arena was a bit of a surprise for a Persona spin-off. Far less surprising was Atlus clearing it for a U.S. launch. After some teasing, Atlus announced the game as a summer release under the title Persona 4 Arena, thus sparing many non-fans from wondering just what a Mayonaka is.

A few big announcements are supposedly in store at this week's Shin Nagasawa return from previous games. Etrian Odyssey IV also has a fast-approaching release date of July 5 in Japan.

The Dynasty Warriors series is an oft-overlooked pillar of the game industry. If each title is merely about cutting through entire armies of foes, the formula has yet to wear thin for KOEI, and it's inspired such spin-offs as Empires, Strikeforce, Xtreme Legends, and a smattering of anime adaptations. Dynasty Warriors is one of the few sure things in Japan's market, and that's important in an age when the country's game developers frequently struggle for direction.

Of course, it wasn't always like that. The original Dynasty Warriors was a PlayStation fighting game based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the same tale of second-century Chinese history that inspired many of KOEI's strategy games. It wasn't until the second Dynasty Warriors that the series found its feet in wide-scale battles where heroes of ancient China (and other eras, depending on how loose the game plays with history) hack through legions of unfortunate enemies. While the series is most successful in Japan, Dynasty Warriors games come here at a steady pace, with Dynasty Warriors Next arriving for the Vita launch this week and the crossover Warriors Orochi 3 next month. So the time was ripe to ask producer Kenichi Ogasawara a few things about the series.

When did you first come to KOEI? You were there for the first Dynasty Warriors, right?

It was about 19 years ago, when KOEI was just a stand-alone company. I was the game designer for the first Dynasty Warriors, yes.

Why did KOEI decide to turn Dynasty Warriors into an open-field brawler with Dynasty Warriors 2?

When the PlayStation 2 came out, we looked at how we could evolve the series. Just taking the existing fighting-game formula from the first Dynasty Warriors and putting it on the PlayStation 2 would have been just a visual touch-up or something along those lines. What we really wanted to do was make full use of the Emotion Engine, and we came up with the idea of the tactical action franchise.

How do you devise different spin-offs for Dynasty Warriors? How did you come up with Strikeforce?

Well, my team has always been in charge of doing different things with the Dynasty Warriors series. When we started making Strikeforce, there were a few criticisms that the series wasn't changing. So we used a different kind of engine to bring something over from different genres.

Dynasty Warriors has expanded to include anime licenses like Fist of the North Star. How do you decide which anime to adapt? Do you just go with what's popular, or do you specifically look for anime and manga that lend themselves well to the Dynasty Warriors formula?

Well, the first step in deciding really depends on the popularity, of course. That's the entry point, but once we decide on what we want to do, we have to look much deeper into the anime and how it links to a game's battle system in a Dynasty Warriors. We usually look at the main characters and their strengths and break that down. And then we dig even deeper.

Of the licenses or historical periods that Dynasty Warriors hasn't featured yet, which would you want to tackle in a future game?

If we're talking about history, that's a sensitive topic. The reason we originally went with Chinese history is that…well, in Japan it's massive and a very well-known kind of story, and most of our current fans are in Japan. We do think about the whole of world history, and in BladeStorm we focused on that. But outside of history, one thing we really wanted to do was Star Wars in a Dynasty Warriors engine. We thought it'd be great. We were all positive about it, and we started making s with the IP holders. We didn't manage to do it, but it remains one of the best “what-if” projects we've considered.

Is one spin-off more popular in the West than others?

Looking at past games, the numbered titles are always the strongest in the West. Right now, though, we're making a new crossover with One Piece, so I think that has a lot of potential in Japan and in the West.

And how are you adapting One Piece to the Dynasty Warriors engine? Did it present any problems?

In Dynasty Warriors and Gundam, everything took place on a battlefield, so adapting it to a game was quite easy. With One Piece, the manga and anime isn't set on a battlefield. It's one character going after another character. So we have to adapt our game engine to that. For example, in One Piece we have a lot of quick-time events where characters go head to head. Things like that propel the gameplay. Fist of the North Star was the same way.

You also worked on Destrega as well as the first Dynasty Warriors. Would you ever want to make another one-on-one fighter?

I think KOEI's ing with Tecmo brought us Dead or Alive, and that's always been one of the top fighting franchises. So rather than us making one, we want to focus on making Dead or Alive bigger.

BINARY DOMAIN Developer: Toshihiro Nagoshi hopes to set Binary Domain apart by emphasizing “human drama” and building bonds between the player and the Rust Crew. Then again, a recent demo and cutscene samples suggest some rather routine video-game cinematic stabs, from the pack of junk-scavenging children to the completely nondescript-looking hero who wryly remarks “These guns are way bigger than yours.”

Twitter-like dimension. Perhaps he'll send the player to rescue a parody of Mega Man from a cruel game company-country.

PHANTOM BREAKER Developer: Chaos;HEAd. The remainder of the characters are original…technically. But really, they encapsulate all of the usual fighting-game roles. Mikoto's a sword-wielding college girl! Mei's a magical girl! Yuzuha's a ninja girl! Waka's a priestess girl! Itsuki's a hammer-wielding maid girl! Cocoa's a claw-brandishing cosplaying girl! Fin's a laser-shooting, time-traveling winged girl! One can sense the theme by this point, but there are at least two male characters in the mix. Phantom Breaker's gameplay offers two different forms of each character. One's fast and combo-friendly, while the other is slower, tougher, and harder-hitting. Beyond that, the game has a fairly standard array of attacks and special moves, and the graphics aren't as fluid as other titles on the market. It does, however, have the screen-filling character portraits that signify many anime-styled fighting games, and a story mode's available alongside the other features. The North American version of Phantom Breaker sports the re-balanced engine and online multiplayer rooms found in the recent Japanese-market update, and new publisher 7sixty also shows shrewd choice in extras. They're offering the game with a soundtrack, an art-filled strategy guide, and a desk calendar, all at a price point lower than usual.

SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI: Kazuma Kaneko. But hey, Devil Survivor was a good game despite that, and the sequel shows the same promise.