Xenoblade Chronicles director naturally influenced by Western design
Xenoblade Chronicles executive director Tetsuya Takahashi should probably have a lot to say given his latest project's tumultuous journey to worldwide launch, but his extremely concise interview answers to us indicate otherwise. When we asked Takahashi how Xenoblade Chronicles' development scaled comparatively with past projects, he simply told us, "There's no doubt that the scale of this project was large compared to past projects." O ... okay then!
He got a bit more verbose on other subjects, however. How different is the NA/EU version of Xenoblade Chronicles from the original Japanese release last year, for instance? "We made some minor bug adjustments and revised some of the written content for localization. There were also some places where we made minor adjustments to the game balance, but none of the changes resulted in significant differences from the original (Japanese) version," Takahashi said.
Takahashi also spoke to his approach to development of modern RPGs. "I like Western game design a lot, so there were places where I referred to it without thinking about it." But that's not to say Xenoblade Chronicles is a product of a Japanese dev looking solely at Western design philosophy. "Xenoblade is not just influenced by Western game design; it has also undeniably inherited the DNA of Japanese RPGs." Find out for yourself just how that plays out whenXenoblade Chronicles arrives on US retail shelves tomorrow.
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/04/06/xe...by-western-de/
