How to Make a Bad Game
Famitsu explores what went wrong with Ougon no Kizuna.
Do you remember Ougon no Kizuna? The Wii action RPG from Jaleco looked interesting enough in the preview coverage, yes, promising dark fantasy mayhem and really huge boss battles. But when the game hit Japanese stores in May 28, the reception was less than rosy -- it scored only 17 out of 40 points in Famitsu's review, which called it "unpolished" and "one step behind the standard." Now Kizuna is getting more coverage in Famitsu -- this time, as part of a large feature on how bad games manage to get made and released.
Damn, that's rough! Luckily, Jaleco game producer Naoki Hoshi is a good sport about his below-average project, and he talked a bit with the magazine about the game's faults.
The most frequent complaint brought up with Kizuna was the frequent loading times the game demanded. "The loading was something we should have improved upon in the design," Hoshi said. "We had always been calculating the amount of data to be loaded at once, but we kept on adding assorted things afterward which increased the amount of data, so we were forced to up the number of loads."
The game uses a "pencil shading" graphical system which attracted a bit of attention when the trailer was first released. The graphical choice ultimately backfired on the development team, though. "We put a filter on the graphics, and it looks good on still images," Hoshi explained. "But once things start to move, the filter moves along with it and it looks like you're seeing the game through a pane of frosted glass. I tried working with the programmers to make it look more natural, but it didn't turn out well in the end."
Famitsu had generally good things to say about the battle system, but criticized its repetitive boss encounters and occasional slowdown. "I thought the battle system went pretty well, but the enemies are made out of too many polygons and sometimes the game has trouble keeping up," Hoshi said. "Of course, we do things like not draw enemies that're offscreen, but -- I don't know if you want to call it a lack of teamwork or what, but during development, it was all we could do to implement that [optimization]."
Finally, there was Kizuna's boring story sequences -- the majority of which are just one or two standing figures exchanging long windows of text conversation with each other. "The demo sequences use high-polygon models different from the ones used in battle, but that proved to pose a lot of difficulty for us," Hoshi lamented. "I really wanted to place characters right on the map and have them move around and talk there for the demo scenes, but we couldn't do it, so we had to explain it all in text instead, which I regret."
Despite all the regrets (and the fact that his latest game will almost certainly never, ever get a sequel), Hoshi is still upbeat. "I think we made the right choice in the game concept and in the way we tried new things," he told Famitsu. "I'd like to keep that attitude going and continue making high-quality games, but I think I'd like to make them more complete products from now on."
http://www.gametab.com/news/3041587/
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