CN: As a company, do you focus on the Japanese market, or are you focusing on more of a global market with your titles?

YO: I definitely keep an eye on the global market myself. However, as a company, Game Republic's focus has to follow suit with the needs of the publishers that hire us. We're aware that America has the biggest market, that Europe is the second largest, and that the Japanese market is actually really small. But when we work with Japanese companies, we're usually asked to develop games that will sell well in Japan, and we have to respond accordingly.

The controller would have shaken when you got hit during battle, or rattled if you stepped in a trap and then quit as soon as you got yourself out of it. There are all sorts of things we could've added in.

But we were told we'd only have the Sixaxis, so those ideas got left out. Then, at the last moment, they told us we could add in some rumble features if we liked. And the feeling was sort of like, "Really? At this point? Okay, I guess we will." It was a development filled with a lot of nagging quirks like that. The problems boiled down to poor timing, I think.

Yukiko Miyajima Grové: So then, Sony isn't very forthcoming with information like that?

YO: Not at all. I mean, it's natural that they want their products released under the best circumstances, and we can only go by what they tell us. We'd love them to give us any information they can a bit early, but they don't play favorites. Of course, there's always the internet. (Laughs)

If they let us in on some secret a day before they announced it, we couldn't do anything about it anyway. But sometimes, looking at the net, you can find these things out ahead of time.