Producer Takeuchi-san reveals Lost Planet 2’s ”core elements” are Japanese, whereas music and language was ”handled overseas”.
Despite this apparent ‘East shall never meet West’ comment, Capcom has really been pushing for more collaboration with Western developers. This has been mainly to survive the stagnation of the Japanese domestic market that many are fearful of.
Takeuchi-san believes it’s these same differences which help push Lost Planet to us gamers in the West though. ”I think they really appreciated that our familiarity with this Western genre and how we added a Japanese twist to it by incorporating our own ideas and materials, thus setting it apart from normal Western third person shooters.”
The big-time game producer was speaking in an internal Capcom interview.
”The core elements of the game were developed in Japan, while the music and some of the language details were handled overseas. Cultural differences don’t allow for the smooth collaboration between Japan and developers overseas,” he explained.
We Westerners love to play hero, reckons the Japanese. ”…many popular Western games don’t even show the face of the hero, thus making the hero an alter ego of the player.” With this in mind, they made sure to develop a ”strong hero character” for us.
It’s an interesting read, and worth a peek if you want in on what those Japanese videogame masters think about collaborating with us hero-obsessed overseas gamers.
