OR: Going back in time a little bit: Popful Mail for the Sega CD. You had mentioned previously in an interview that Working Designs had upped the difficulty of the game on purpose. And in Lunar: Eternal Blue Complete, the save system was expanded from three save games per two blocks on the memory card to thirty saves per memory card, so you could have sixty saves between the two slots-
VI: Yeah, but you had to pay for them with experience, which people really hated.
*laughter*
OR: Well, that goes without saying!
VI: Well, trying to make some sort of cost for saving so that you wouldn’t be saving all the time to sort of ‘cheat’ the difficulty of the dungeons where you save after every battle and there really is no penalty for losing. [Where] you go back to the beginning, nothing really happened. So by making it cost saves, it would cut down on the number of times you save. And its not unprecedented, there are other games that did similar things, but people HATED it. They REALLY HATED that change a lot. So, yeah, I got a lot of grief about that one.
OR: Did that influence how you change games in the future for localization?
VI: I never, ever did that again.
*laughter*
Yeah, when you were talking about finding out whether people love or hate something, for that thing, I knew that they HATED it. Because everybody said ‘We hate this, we hate you for doing it.’ But that was [an] overwhelmingly negative response to that. So I didn’t do it anymore. I was like ‘Well, okay, just control yourself when you’re doing your own saves.’
OR: What do you look for and what factors do you consider when you’re making changes to a game like this? Like increasing the difficulty of Popful Mail or the amount of saves in Lunar: Eternal Blue Complete?
VI: We always try to add more saves. With Summon Night [5], we also increased the amount of saves in that. So now you can do one-hundred saves, which is an excessive amount of saves, but that allows you – the game has so many branches, so many characters, so many paths, if you’re a completionist, you an save virtually anywhere and have a lot of saves.
In the original Japanese version, there was less than fifty. Always try to add more saves, as a player, that is what I want. Games that give you one save or three saves or five saves – ‘Why? That’s an artificial limitation.’ It drives me nuts. So we try to have as many saves as we can realistically do. And really the limit on Summon Night [5], was when you do a new game plus or when you start the game over with your stuff brought forward, it has to scan the saves to see what’s there. And after a hundred saves, that timed it a little too long so we had to cut it off. We probably could have done two-hundred, three-hundred saves, a lot more saves than that even, but a hundred sounded like a good number so we cut it off there.
OR: With the change of the difficulty of Popful Mail or adding in analog support for some of the games, how much say or veto power does the original developer in Japan have over these changes?
VI: Generally speaking, they couldn’t care less. They’re happy that we’re doing – I shouldn’t say that. They, generally speaking, trust what we’re doing and as long as you’re making a positive impact on the game, like we added the dual screen play to Class Heroes 2[g], the Acquire [OR Note: the Japanese developer/publisher company] guys were super impressed and they really thought that was cool. Adding the extra difficulty – you know, basically, if it will help the game in the US, they’re happy, they’re fine with that.
The only time we’ve ever had an issue where we had to take something out that we did [add was] with double entendres in Alundra. We put some pretty hardcore double entendres in there, and Sony [U.S.] was like ‘Waah, really?!’ and they said ‘You should definitely check this with Sony Japan.’, who we had licensed it from. And they [Sony Japan] were like ‘Well, we understand what you’re going for, it is funny, but you probably should take them out.’ And so there is two double entendres that are, that were in the press versions of Alundra, and in fact John Ricciardi, he was reviewing for – I think 1-Up, maybe, I don’t know, one of the game magazines at the time – he actually emailed me and and said ‘Dude, is this really the retail release? Is this going into the retail release?’ And I was like ‘Yeah! Sure!’. It’s like ‘I can’t believe that it came up and what I was reading!’ And yeah, apparently, it was a little too controversial for the developer.
That’s the only time we’ve put something in or done something that the Japanese developers were like ‘Uhh, you should probably take it out.’
OR: Now, Exile: Wicked Phenomenon, when that game was being localized, you had said in a prior interview that “Telenet was doing the reprogramming of the game instead of Working Designs, and so the number of modifications that could be done was limited.” And as a result, you said that you ‘accidentally created one of the hardest games ever.’
VI: Yeah, that was bad. We didn’t start doing our own programming here in the U.S. until the Saturn. We kinda started doing it on the Sega CD, we would go, we would do the work, then go to Japan and sit with the programmer for the last couple of weeks of development so we kinda were baby-sitting our way into it on the Sega CD. We didn’t fully change over to doing all the programming in the U.S. until the Saturn. For that one, Telenet: The deal was that we had a certain number of submissions that we could give to them with changes. And after that, there was no more. And Telenet at that time was really busy cranking out tons of games trying to stay afloat because they were sinking. And so they were just farting out millions of games that all kind of sucked. And they basically couldn’t take the time to do another revision for us, and they were like ‘that’s the deal, sorry, the end.’
So yeah, the change we made was really small, it was like a tiny tweak to the difficulty but it was one of those things that was a tipping point where going up three (3) HP took us over some threshold and it kind of looped it around and made it like its almost signed numbers. So you had a halfway point, you go past the halfway point, now you’re a super-giant number. And so yeah, we got it back and I honestly thought the game was impossible.
[OR Note: Exile: Wicked Phenomenon had a major imbalance in the game’s active combat system. The player’s attacks would often do minimal damage to the enemies, while the enemy’s attacks would often do catastrophic damage to the player. Power-leveling was difficult as well, since most enemies do not respawn and you could not revisit prior areas. Therefore, every time the player entered into battle, it was quite literally a gamble with death.]
We were like ‘Holy crap, nobody can beat this game, this is unfinishable.’ And then we played it for like two weeks, we developed strategies to get through the hard parts, and we finally finished the game. But you have to do some ridiculous stuff just to get through the last level. And then you get to the boss, and the boss is a piece of cake. All the monsters to get –to- the boss will kill you with one hit, but the boss is like, super easy. So yeah, it’s a really weird, accidentally hard game.
