It's very interesting that you
allow characters to die forever, as long as they're not main characters. How
did you make that decision?
RN: That
was one of the first things that we decided that we would incorporate, and it
was incorporated into the very first build -- which was just a simulation-like
tactical RPG as well.
And we wanted it very realistic in that sense -- that if
you lose a person in the war, that person is not going to come back. We also
wanted the player to feel that they need to go and rescue their platoon members
if they were in danger, and feel the loss of their members if they happen to
lose one of them to the enemy.
It's very interesting because
there is so much back story for these characters -- and also story moving
forward. There is a lot of work put into the scenarios of each side character, like
the girl who gets rejected by one of the main characters and then becomes an S&M
queen. (laughter) I'm sorry that that's the example I took for my question. (laughter)
There is a lot of thought put into it; who is doing the scenario design and how
much time did all of that take?
RN: The
main writer for the scenario and all the characters is the director Tanaka, and
then we also have a team that works with him.
We really wanted to get that
sense of urgency and also the realism of when someone in your team is hurt and
lying there, do you want to go and help them or do you want to go on with your
mission? Do you want to help them and risk your own life? Or do you just want
to leave him there and go on?
In order
for the player to feel that sense of urgency and identify with the gameplay we
felt that it was necessary for each character to have their own unique
personalities -- their own unique features, and that's why every one of our
characters has a different setting, different personality, different strengths
and weaknesses, as well as a very different visual design.
It was quite successful, at least anecdotally,
because I have a friend who played through quite a lot of it, and there was a
character that wouldn't listen to his commands sometimes and who was starting
to annoy him more and more, so when he got killed, my friend just let him go
and didn't care anymore. (laughter) But on the other hand there was a character
who was really good at headshots and he used him all the time. His friend would
watch him play and when that character got killed she cried. (laughter)
RN: That's
exactly the type of emotional identification that we wanted it to be. I'm
happy!
How did you go about creating
these characters? Obviously in order to appeal to as many people as possible
there have to be archetypes, so that they can be general enough to identify
with, but also have enough specific personality traits, and elements, so that
someone can latch on to this character versus that character. Did
you spend a lot of time thinking about that and balancing that?
RN: For
the main characters we spent a lot of time locking down the personalities. Just
because it impacts the game story itself. For the sub-characters, these are all
regular citizens that are brought into the army because of the war, so
basically they can be anyone around you.
We're pretty adventurous in bringing
different types of people through the sub-characters. Some of the characters
therefore may be out of place for the tone of the story, but we wanted a lot of
variety.
You have these individual
characters, yet leveling up is the opposite of a traditional tactics RPG. In
traditional games, each character
levels up, and that's where part of their personality comes from, whereas in
this game, unit types level up. So you give them more personal identity but
also they have less functional identity, because they level up together.
RN: That's
actually an area we had a lot of discussion on. Because we have about 50 sub
characters -- and including the primary characters it all adds up to maybe 60
characters -- if we did it the way other RPGs would do, like you said, with
level-ups per character, then players are going to have their favorite
characters and not use any of the other characters, and we didn't want that.
We wanted
the players to always be able to choose different varieties of characters for
each of their missions. You can choose about ten characters per mission. And
then in order for us to do that we thought it would be better and easier for
the player to choose other characters if all the units leveled up at the same
time.
This
explains how the actual system itself is very harsh in Valkyria Chronicles, in the sense that if your character dies they're
gone forever for that game. Each mission, it doesn't matter how many characters
die or how many characters you kill on the enemy's side. It's only whether you
win or lose the battle with the number of turns you take.
And all
the characters, no matter how much effort you put into using one character or
the other, the units with the same dimensions level up at the same time. So in
terms of the system itself, it's very harsh. It doesn't take into consideration
each of the character's personalities or weaknesses and strengths at all.
So
that's another way for the team to present the player with this situation of which
characters you choose. And in this situation, do you kill off all your
characters because you still have so many more left to use, and dispose of?
Yeah, it's very interesting to
make character choice based on personality instead of ability, to me.
RN: We
wanted it to be emotional.