Q: I see... What about you, Mr Mizuno?
Mizuno: Let me say this first that... I haven't designed a single character in EP3.
(everybody laughs)
Mizuno: In this Material Collection book, there shoudn't be a single design artwork. But I did a lot of illustrations and I checked a lot of them, too. The events got bigger, the contents got bigger, so I just had a lot more checking to do.
Q: There were also a lot of IRL events, outside of PSO2. This is something that you, Mr Sakai, wanted to do, right?
Sakai: It's not so much that I wanted to do it, I mean, it's an online game, but you enjoy it a lot more when you actually know people in-game and when you meet new people through it. "Don't just play the game all the damn time, go outside, too!", so to speak.
Mizuno: That sounds like something out of some anime director's mouth...
Sakai: No, I've had a history of saying you need to play games to enrich your life.
Mizuno: Back to the topic of designs, in EP1&2 we knew that for weapons and enemies, the rare versions would get bigger, so I made a point of keeping all designs to a manageable size, it was an obsession. And then EP3 comes along and the first random fodders are like 7m tall...
Kimura: And the bosses! I mean, you saw Magatsu, so after that...
Mizuno: Yeah, exactly!
Kimura: I think Magatsu is the biggest thing we can do right now. If we want to go further, we will need to take a different spin on how to show the boss. Plus, it was really difficult to design it, it took a lot of work.
Mizuno: It did take a long time.
Kimura: The team assigned to Magatsu was young, so it was a bit rough.
Q: The AIS were also a new experience.
Mizuno: Yeah, we had big plans for them at first, like a heavily armed version, and several other variations.
How NPC are created
Q: Let's go back a little, so... Mr Mizuno, the last design you made would be Luther?
Mizuno: Actually, the last character I designed was 2nd Generation Clarisse Claes. [whatever the spelling actually is]
Uno: For EP3 we had a bunch of designers work on their own little things.
Q: Well, there aren't that many new characters in EP3.
Sakai: True, the's Sukunahime, Kotoshiro... and Double, I guess? Plus Aurora.
Kimura: We often had the case where the character would already exist but needed a new outfit or so.
Uno: Yeah. It was the case for Apprentice... I mean Euclita.
Kimura: And then there was Katori and Saga.
Uno: About Katori, it was actually Kimura who created the character.
Kimura: Well, we had the costume for the new class, and we needed a character to push the class and the costume.
Mizuno: We knew Harukotan was coming, it had a japanese flair to it, so we need that plus the bouncer aspect.
Kimura: I took charge of the design while trying to stay as close as possible to what you had planned out. I had to put a lot of work in there. It was really a difficult birth.
Q: We can say it was worth it, Katori is a really propular character now.
Kimura: After EP1, we consciously tried to make Kuna into the heroine, so it's no wonder she got popular, but then I thought, now we can't create a new character that will get everyone's attention anymore. I was feeling bad about it.
Uno: In EP1, Risa was incredibly popular though.
Kimura: Ah, yes, Risa, true. But she didn't get popular in the usual fashion, right? For EP2, Uno said he wanted a character that would definitely become popular, so he came up with the settings for Io.
Q: Io sure was popular!
Uno: I'm really glad it turned out that way. I did it!
Q: I guess the choice of her voice actor (Ayana Taketatsu) was good too.
Kimura: Actually, it was quite an adventure. Miss Taketatsu is a very popular voice actress, but in her other works she never does a voice for a character like Io. She even asked us "Me? Really? Are you sure about that?". But I thought that if she could nail the voice it would probably be very interesting. We actually had her sing in her character voice, it turned out nothing like she usually sings, but this, in itself, was quite an interesting result. As a character, Io turned out surprisingly well. And so when we then had to think of something for EP3, it was really hard.
Uno: We really spent ages dwelling on this.
Kimura: Our biggest problem to solve was to come up with a better character than Io for EP3. The main ones, Sukunahime and Kotoshiro, would come up in the story anyway, and we had to make Sukunahime someone to difficult to engage, because of the plot. Plus her story and Kotoshiro's past are sad. They couldn't be a match for Io. And that's when Uno told me, "how about this?".
Uno: And I told him about Katori.
Kimura: He did a presentation, complete with dialogues, and I thought that could do the trick. But since she was supposed to inherit the Bouncer class, I had to make her different from the girl in the main visuals. So I chose a different hair style, and since we had introduced a new type of face in the character creator, I really wanted to use that as well.
Uno: Katori had to be completely changed. In the beginning, she was more like Patty. I had to press reset and rewrite her from scratch.
Mizuno: Oh, she has that kind of dark secret past?
Uno: At one point, we wanted Jean to be her father.
Kimura: Yes, actually, I made the offer. I said that for a new character, maybe we could talk about her parents or something.
Uno: Oh yeah, you did!
Kimura: I wanted her to be someone's daughter, and so, since Jean is a bit older in the cast, we thought it would be interesting if she were his daughter.
Q: Who would have thought! Jean?
Uno: In the end, we decided to scrap that idea though.
Kimura: But because of that previous setting, she still says "Father" at one point.
Uno: At first, we imagined her to be this really obnoxious girl. She was this young lady from a nice family, blonde, quite shorter, and she'd be yelling and stuff.
Originally Posted by Meteor Weapon
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Connect With Us