We sat down for a digital interview with Yoshiro Kimura, the Director of Little King's Story for the Nintendo Wii. The game nears retail this month, so we asked Kimura some questions regarding the art, gameplay and inspiration behind this fun-filled title.
Gabriel Vega (Neo) - The graphic detail of Little King's Story seems to borrow from classic games. When approaching the art of the game what was the inspiration and goal?
Yoshiro Kimura - First of all, the style of the cut scenes were influenced by Japanese and Russian art animators such as Aleksandr Petrov, Tatsutoshi Nomura, and Kunio Kato. Their stuff is amazing! I really look up to them. They are incredible artists!
I’m nowhere near their level, but I’d like to continue expressing myself in various ways.
The in-game display is expressed with a balance that I really like. I’m a big fan of old games, like Donkey Kong, Pacman, and Zelda on the SNES. But, you don’t see many games these days with those short, cartoony characters.
Recently games have come to be bold productions like movies, but I think it’s boring to have the same realistic characters with 1:8 body proportions in every game. I’m just a rebellious little kid. If everyone else is making games with tall, realistic characters, I’m going to make mine using characters with 1:2 proportions.
Neo - The progression system in the game is slow at first glance but as we saw in a demonstration at E3 the township development is very in depth. How much exploration is available and how many hours would one spend finding the riches in the game?
YK - The collection element will give you a lot to do. Each princess has a request for you to fulfill, so you need to collect everything they want to make them happy! Impoverish yourself for love. LOL.
My favorite has you collecting tunes by listening to villagers humming. The in-game characters are very lively as they hum these songs, and you are able to collect them (I actually hummed one song too!
You’d probably need more than 40 hours to clear everything in the game including collecting all the weapons, cuisine, gems, art... and tunes.
Neo - The battle system operates on a limited attack group. Was there a curve designed in the game for players that focus on township development over soldier / army building so that they can pass as well?
YK - Of course! There aren’t any challenges in the game that require a single job to clear, otherwise people with fast reactions could clear the game with only Carefree Adults.
There aren’t any job classes that can’t fight. Some of them are just not very skilled at it. In some ways, the Hardworking Farmers can be more useful than the combative fighter types... because they can uncover hot springs!
I’d like players to form strategies around teams of various job classes, or learn the boss patterns and attack them like in an action game, or just come up with your own approach to the game.
Neo - Little King's Story tends to focus on player driven results. Since success is a given, is there another option for the player to fail their kingdom or miss key parts of development with bad choices?
YK - The kingdom will never suffer because of the king’s adventures, but the king’s popularity might drop. If you fight too recklessly the people may lose faith.
There are many elements to it, but take heart, because if you forget to build something you can always come back to it later!
Neo - From what the preview has entailed so far a key thing noticed was that citizens that cross to new professions seem to retain their old health status. Will that remain in the end or will new classes get the benefit of high health rates where transfering classes will retain their lower HP level?
YK - HIS... is kind of a secret. But I dislike it when you force people to change their jobs all the time. This applies in the game world as well as the real world. LOL.
Neo - When approaching the game itself, what was the driven goal for the game as it seems to appeal to a younger audience as a core crowd but the visuals seem to appeal to nostalgic gamers that played RPG's in the NES and SNES period.
YK - Basically my personal policy when making games is that originality (soul) has to be the foremost concern. Not only in games, but in manga, or movies, or painting... an artist seeks to express originality.
However, in this game I paid close attention to another element. That is, I wanted to show my respect for past games.
In Japan we have a saying: New knowledge by visiting the past. This means that you can learn many new things by studying what came before.
For example, I played this old NES game called “Clu Clu Land” and it reminded me of something. I remembered what was so fun about playing NES games. It was the aspect of controlling something. That’s my favorite part of playing games. How about you?
In this game, the king chooses a direction and fires his guards out like bullets. We made adjustments and toiled to make this control feel really good.
The most original parts of Little King’s Story are the very distinctive boss battles you fight against the 7 mysterious kings. I really put a lot of effort into these.
I wanted to add some flavor to the story and the battle system for the king bosses. They are highly... peculiar.
For the boss battles, I tried to think of as many ways as possible to use the “shooting”-style control system. I really hope everyone has fun with it.
By the way, my eccentric favorite of all the kings is TV Dinnah. There’s no way anyone has seen a battle like this before! There are crying babies, UFOs flying around, etc etc.
forums
