The story quests that people came to like
Q: Can you start by telling us how you feel now that you're done with episode 3? (EP3 hereafter)
Uno: You say "done with EP3" but quite frankly, I feel like we're not done yet. We got to explain a number of things about Matoi and Dark Falz. We had to finish things up before EP4, so... I guess it's good that we could reach a certain plateau in the story.
Kimura: It was planned in four parts, originally.
Uno: Yes, when I first showed the story to the team, it had four phases.
Kimura: In the end we only made three parts, but we could include all the contents in them.
Uno: That much is true. The parts of the story pertaining to the events of ten years ago (Quest 2-6) were supposed to be EP3, in the early drafts.
Q: So what we see in 2-6 was supposed to be EP3?
Uno: Yes, it was supposed to include all that happens ten years ago, with more details. But then, we had a lot of debates, and in the end, it came out like this. But as far as the story I had in mind is concerned, I could tell what I had to tell up to that point.
Q: So... up to EP3, what's the part you achieved the best?
Uno: That would be 2-6. We could really structure the scenario of the 2nd generation Matoi particularly well. We managed to call back to hints given in the very first chapter (Calls from the past) which was our intent all along, so that was good. It came out so well because the team for the story events, Mr Kimura and myself all were on the same page as to what we had to do. It doesn't mean the other quests were bad, I just have a soft spot for that quest, I personaly think it came out great. Plus, 2-6 is called "The reason I was born" and we could finish the story with 3-7 being called "The reason you were born", which is very satisfactory to me.
Q: Which reminds me, those quest names are written all in hiragana in some parts, but have some kanji in other occurences. Why is that? Any hidden meaning?
Uno: Well, that was because of... a problem of text limitations, actually.
Q: Whaaat ?
Uno: In the menu of the Quest Counter, we only have room for 10 letters. So if we wrote the name in hiragana, it would make a 1 letter text overflow. Which is why we need to write it with kanjis in menus and whatnots. But when the story name is called up on screen in the quests themselves, we made it all hiragana. It's not just to be rebellous or anything.
Kimura: We still get bug reports for this, you know? "The text is not the same for the story name, is that OK?"
Uno: We had no choice !
Q: There's a side-story to EP2 revolving around Melfonsina. All the little scenes revolving around specific NPCs are actually interesting. It leaves you wanting for even more of those.
Uno: If I had unlimited amounts of time to my disposal, I'd write a ton more.
Kimura: The side-story of EP3 revolves around Aurora, but it wasn't planned, originally.
Uno: We had already a concept and settings for the Photoners, so we thought, hey, might as well cram a few things in there while we're at it. Hints that will pertain to EP4 and beyond.
Kimura: The rest was a matter of choosing from what we already had. Some planets were still not decided, so for Harukotan, we had to add it all to the mix, but we got around to doing all we had planned for the events leading to the Profound Darkness. In our former series, like PSU for instance, you start with the offline portion of the story, all flashy and impressive, and as you got to the point where the story went online, we then kept the scenes rather simple.
Q: Well, you kinda *need* to have the players included in the story events, right?
Kimura: That, too. As we rolled out the story parallel to the game updates, we had to cut some tidbits. In PSO2, we made the story into small cutscenes, so we knew we could pull it off at least until the release of the PSVita version, but I wasn't confident we could still be doing that 2 or 3 years down the road. I was afraid that the end of the story would be a novel.
Mizuno: What, like a sound novel or something?
Kimura: Yeah, we could totally have done it that way. So we started in EP1 and waited for the reception, what the players would say about the format, etc, and we used their critics to make it better in EP2 and EP3. That's where the story went strong, and users liked it better. The cutscene events themselves were better, we got a lot of reactions from some parts where we had put a lot of efforts. But that means the team for those events had to put more work in...
Sakai: Yeah, the budget kept rising and rising. How often do you need to redo those motion captures, anyway?
Mizuno: Some days I'd think "Wow, Kimura is missing work today as well?" but in reality you were in the motion capture studio...
Kimura: Well, I started to be adamant about some things. Because I had finally gotten the hang of it. And when the cutscenes are good, the players are happy and they will make sure you know it. There's return on investment to consider, of course, but if you do a good job, the users will support you all the more, so I wanted to do things right.
Q: I guess it's difficult to know where to spend the budget when the game is free?
Sakai: That *is* true.
Kimura: There's the money, but for me, there also was the time I'd spend on it. I was a Main Director on EP1, so I had to check everything. Not only the story and the lore, I had to look at the combat, the quests, the items, the UI (User Interface), etc, so there was only so much time that I could dedicate to create the story cutscenes. But then near the end of EP1 and from EP2 onwards, we had Nakamura and Suganuma promoted to Directors, so they checked a lot of it, and I could look into details to the way the story events were made. It allotted me more time to think about how to tie the story and the contents, or to ponder what changes I wanted to include in the updates. I think it all led to an overall better quality.
Key Person Interview (EP3) Translation Request
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Originally Posted by Meteor Weapon
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