Stranger Than Heaven In-Depth Interview: A Brief Summary
Shortly after the big reveal this week, RGG held a live stream where studio head Yokoyama, producer Sakamoto, and the director Abe answered questions regarding the game. I’ll post some tidbits from this whole conversation that stood out to me that I thought the community would find interesting, especially since the video is over 100 minutes long and most might not have the time to go through it all. Do note that subs are machine translated so they might be completely off, or I might have just misinterpreted what they were trying to convey.
In terms of production costs, Yokoyama mentioned that they’re probably not as high as you’d think. He does concede that if made by any other studio, the budget for the game may be about three times as high, but the workflow at RGG allowed them to be pretty efficient.
Development on the title started in earnest about 2.5-3 years ago. Later in the video Yokoyama clarifies that full development started a bit before Pirate Gaiden started, but they both started pretty close together.
The title was announced earlier than expected. It just happened that the city in 1915 was finished fairly quickly (2-3 months) so Yokoyama figured that they had enough to show off and get some early impressions.
Daito’s proficiency in Japanese will improve as time moves forward. It is also mentioned that his body language also becomes more traditionally Japanese, to the point they used different mocap actors to emphasize the difference. It was mentioned later that his improved Japanese vocabulary will expand dialogue options in conversations.
Snoop Dogg and presumably other actors scanned into the game gave input on their appearance. They noted Orpheus’ braided beard and outfit choices were requested by Snoop himself. The famously mysterious Ado was NOT scanned in to preserve her anonymity, but her character’s face might be accurate by pure coincidence.
The combat system was something Yokoyama wanted to implement for a while. The impression I got was they wanted to try something a bit more methodical, rather than letting the player button mash and still pull off flashy combos. That said, as players get used to it they will be able to pull off impressive combos anyway.
In-spite of assumptions, the Virtua Fighter team was not involved in designing the combat. They are a completely separate team.
While not mandatory, they highly recommend using weapons instead of purely going bare fisted. Weapons in the game are significantly more powerful to lend a more visceral, grounded tone and also to highlight that Daito is not a heroic character.
Apologies to the players, but dual wielding weapons as demonstrated in the reveal trailer will not be implemented. They simply could not get it to work well in testing.
In general, if they were not confident in the new combat system, they would have reverted back to more traditional Yakuza style combat. They are still fine tuning the gameplay and hope to let people try it out eventually. While they are proud of what’s been developed, they still acknowledge that it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
The director, Mikinobu Abe, has been at the company for 7 years. He comes from a background studying film, and all cutscenes down to cinematography were directed by him. He was actually not chosen as director for his English proficiency - that was just a happy coincidence.
The visuals for the game were initially envisioned to be realistic, similar to most other RGG games, but a glitch distorting colour values at one point inspired the current visual direction for the game. Yokoyama felt the filters gave each city and era their own distinct visual identity, and helped stand out compared to other games.
In terms of creative freedom, they’ve never really been constricted by working on Yakuza, hence why they managed to go from beat ‘em ups to turned based RPG. Any limitations are more unconscious decisions made from working on the same series for so long, and this title allowed to rethink everything from the ground up down to menu design.
Choices such as bargaining with the prostitute and choosing to execute and enemy during combat will have some sort of consequence during the course of the game. Producer Sakamoto noted the choice wasn’t necessarily “kill or mercy” but more “punish or forgive”.
That said, there are NO multiple endings. Yokohama stated himself that as long as he is head of the studio, there will be no game with multiple endings or branching paths.
Narratively, they aren’t looking to create a grand mystery for the game such as hiding the true mastermind behind a nefarious plot. This game’s focus are the trials and tribulations of Daito and Yu throughout 50 years of their lives.