Sega Week at Famitsu : All coverage here!

[Sharky]

Yukio Sugino interview - Sega past, present and future

Yukio Sugino, director of internal game development at Sega's Japan home office, has a clear idea of what makes his company great. "Sega's philosophy has always been that creativity is our lifeblood," he said in an interview published in this week's Famitsu magazine, "and we try to reflect that not just in what we make, but in all aspects of our work. Staying consistent with this spirit is what's allowed us to approach the world of entertainment in such a broad scope."

A lot of that broad scope lay in the fact that Sega -- especially back in the days when it was a hardware manufacturer -- had a worldwide strategy for its consoles and arcade releases starting way back in the 8-bit days. "With the arcade business at the time, we never really divided our market between Japan and overseas," Sugino said. "Our approach was that we were selling to the world -- there was never any discussion over adjusting our games for this or that region. With arcade games, you're already losing the customer if he has to read the instruction card; you have to give him more enjoyment than he's expecting for the money he pays. If we want that to happen, we can't afford to have a language barrier, we can't afford to make the controls difficult to understand."

What were the big turning points for Sega's arcade business? For Sugino, who joined Sega in 1993, the answer's obvious. "Focusing strictly on games, the fighting game boom kicked off by Capcom was a major one," he said. "It created a real-life community; it reinforced the fun of going someplace where people share your likes and your hobbies. Another one is online. Sega's been involved with mobile providers ever since Virtua Fighter 4, and more recently there's been Border Break, a network game where up to 20 players can compete at once. Games like that let you go to the arcade and enjoy what makes network gaming fun without a lot of trouble, and I think that's one big advantage that arcades still have."

On the consumer side of things, Sugino can't ignore the effect that Sega's retirement from console sales in 2001 had on the company. "Certainly that'd be when we retired the Dreamcast from the market," he responded. "We tried to become a software company, but it's been difficult for us to shake off the DNA stored within us from our hardware days. At Sega we've always had this deep-rooted thought that we needed to have representative games in every current genre in order to attract all walks of gamer. That's really a first-party hardware marker philosophy, though, and the fact is that if a game doesn't attract much of a userbase, then the industry really doesn't need it. So we needed to change our concept to simply making gamers as happy as possible with our games, and changing that mindset was pretty hard for a lot of our company groups."


Where does Sega's future lie? In Sugino's eyes, it's all about attracting as many people to their work as they can. "I want to get as many people around the world as possible interacting with the entertainment Sega produces," he said. "Our team members have spent long nights trying to make games as fun as they can get them, really valuable experiences. From my standpoint, seeing games like that go unnoticed by people is about the saddest thing I can think of. As a company, we need to bring our newest creations wherever they can go and show people the fun involved with them. This challenge of bring Sega-style play, Sega-style entertainment, Sega-style content to people worldwide is the road Sega needs to tackle going into the future."

http://www.1up.com/news/sega-developmen ... ses-future



On a NEW SHINING TITLE

In an interview printed in this week's Famitsu magazine, Tsuyoshi Sawada -- the main force behind Sega's Shining series of role-playing games -- mentioned that a new title in the brand will be announced before very long.

"It's been ten years since the Shining series was re-invented," Sawada commented. "Currently, we're preparing a title that sums up the whole series and should provide an answer to users' curiosity. I can't give details yet, but I'd like to reveal it before we go too far into the future."

The Shining series, which debuted in 1991 on the Sega Genesis, comprises a total of 28 releases, counting remakes and multi-scenario titles. The series fell formant for several years after 1998's Shining Force III on the Saturn before getting rekindled by Grasshopper Manufacture's 2002 release Shining Soul. "Shining is a long-running series, but development work largely stopped on it for a period of time," Sawada said. "We redeveloped and resurrected the name as Sega shifted from hardware to software, and the goal for the games I've worked on is to target a large swath of the userbase and do something that hasn't been done before with the series. That's still the direction I take today."

Shining Force EXA, released in 2007 for the PS2, was the last Shining title to receive an official English-language release.

http://www.1up.com/news/shining-game-an ... ent-coming




On BINARY DOMAIN

Sega's Binary Domain, a new shooter from Yakuza boss Toshihiro Nagoshi, was originally revealed back in January...and as much as Nagoshi would like to tell you more about the game, he can't. "To be honest, there's very little that we can actually reveal at this precise time," he admitted to Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. "There's a lot I want to talk about; it's practically all about to burst out of my mouth, but I just have to keep it all bottled up for now. All I can really say is that it's getting better by the day."

The outspoken Nagoshi may have concentrated most of his energy on the Yakuza games over the past few years, but he wants it clear that this new title borrows nothing from his past releases. "I think it'd lead to fewer misunderstandings if people thought of them as different projects," he said. "Ryu ga Gotoku Of The End was targeted first and foremost for Yakuza fans; it's easy to play for people who aren't used to gun-based action games, but you can't really call it a game for hardcore shooter fans. Binary Domain, on the other hand, is made to be easy to play for people who like shooters, although we're trying not to make it too unapproachable for beginners either."

Like a lot of shooters, Binary Domain is set in the near future -- in this case, Tokyo in the year 2080. "The fact the game's set around 70 years from now is based on something I've had in my mind for a while," Nagoshi commented. "It took about 50 years for Japan to go from losing the war in 1945 to how it's developed today, and when you think about it that way, people can change a lot in the span of 70 years. It's more than enough time for society to change, and if anything, the change is going to be a lot more rapid than what we've seen in the past 50 years. The Tokyo depicted in Binary Domain is one way the future might work out, a kind of bold expansion on the changes that are just beginning to come into play right now. We're aiming for a 2080 Tokyo that doesn't seem like a total fantasy."

It's a shooter with a deep story element, no doubt about that. "I really don't think there's been a game with this much dialogue to it," Nagoshi said. "It might wind up being the game with the greatest volume of dialogue in game history -- not that I was deliberately setting out to do that, but there's enough drama to this game that all the dialogue is necessary to portray it. That's what the scope of this game is like."

Although Binary Domain's setting isn't exactly innovative by most standards, Nagoshi remains confident that it'll succeed at telling a ripping tale. "Science fiction and shooters get combined together a lot, but if we're going to go with this theme, we definitely aren't going to make it a standard sort of story," he said. "Life is one of the major themes we explore in this game, and that's a sort of universal concept that can be expressed in a lot of different ways. I think the near-future setting will let us express that theme in a way that hasn't been done before."

Binary Domain doesn't have any firm release date announced yet.

http://www.1up.com/news/return-visit-binary-domain




Yakuza series retrospective with the Developers!

Sega's Toshihiro Nagoshi is busy developing Binary Domain at the moment, taking a bit of a break from the Yakuza series he's spearheaded. He can be forgiven if he wants to step away from Japanese gangster games for a little while -- he's created seven Yakuza games since the series debuted in 2005, after all. That's a lot of back-alley knife fights and nights wasted chatting up girls at cabaret clubs.

For series producer Masayoshi Kikuchi, getting the first game off the ground was a dicey process. "I chiefly handled producer duties, so I shared the pain with Nagoshi a lot of the time, I think," he told Famitsu magazine this week. "I do remember it being difficult to get the project approved within the company, not to mention getting cooperation with outside firms."

Masayoshi Yokoyama, the main scriptwriter for the series, had it even worse. "Everything from the scriptwriting forward was a first-time experience for me," he recalled. "I'd come up with a script packed with all these ideas, and the team would say to me 'This isn't really interesting' or 'The movie scenes are two long.' I think I was angry pretty much every day there, and I used that as a power source."

Both Kikuchi and Yokoyama have nothing but compliments for their boss, a man who created a series that's sold nearly four million copies worldwide. "You could say that Nagoshi has a very firm belief system," Yokoyama said. "He never wavers on anything. For example, when he checks my script, he might say 'I don't like this bit all that much, but whatever, it's fine.' Then, when he checks the storyboards or movie scenes, he'll bring up the exact same issue again, even though he probably doesn't remember bringing it up before. We're talking about very minute details here."

Yakuza was a difficult childbirth indeed, partly because Sega had never really done anything like it before, "The thing that was different about this new project was how it was squarely targeted toward adults," Kikuchi said. "Our intention was to have the 'adult' feel be one of the main draws, but we fretted constantly over how far we should go with it. Even if we stayed within the rules, we didn't want to offend gamers."

"That thought of 'how far can we go?' was a big barrier to the scriptwriting, too," Yokoyama added. "A lot of things had to be cut, because in the beginning it was still a little fuzzy whether we were emphasizing violence or human drama with the story." What sort of things were cut? "I suppose you could say things of an adult nature that weren't going to work -- things I can't really go into here," laughed Kikuchi.

What's been the hardest part of working on this series? For Kikuchi, it's the constant pressure to outdo themselves. "Making an original game poses a different set of challenges from making a sequel," he said. "With a sequel, you're always competing with the previous game; you're compelled to outdo it, which creates a ton of pressure. You have to constantly challenge yourself, and the new people you get to work with each time are good and all, but nonetheless, it's hard." Yokoyama's answer was a tad more specific: "Yakuza 3 was the hardest game for me scriptwise, because I had pretty much run out of things to do. It's easy when you have something original going on, like changing the time period with Kenzan or having multiple heroes in Yakuza 4, but 3...I hardly even want to recall it!"

Despite all the pain, Yokoyama feels uniquely blessed to be involved with Yakuza. "I do feel we had a lot of luck, running into all the people we have," he said. "Otherwise I'm sure the series wouldn't have been the success it's turned out to be. I mean, this was the first scriptwriting job I've ever had. I'm amazed they gave it to me. If I had it to do over again, there's a pretty high chance I would've screwed it all up."

http://www.1up.com/news/yakuza-staff-series

[Suzuki Yu]

he said. "Ryu ga Gotoku Of The End was targeted first and foremost for Yakuza fans; it's easy to play for people who aren't used to gun-based action games, but you can't really call it a game for hardcore shooter fans. Binary Domain, on the other hand, is made to be easy to play for people who like shooters, although we're trying not to make it too unapproachable for beginners either."

this is exactly what i was talking about before when i was defending RGG: of the End.
RGG series designed to be accessible for everyone.

[Suzuki Yu]

new info on Binary Domain

Announced in this week’s issue of Famitsu, Binary Domain is slated for release in 2012. So, there’s still plenty of time for Sega to trickle details about the game’s self-proclaimed advanced artificial intelligence. The magazine also has an in-depth look at the game’s world, but that has not leaked online yet. We’re checking around for it and will post an update when we have more information.

http://www.siliconera.com/2011/04/27/bi ... ntil-2012/

Fmaitsu's Cover is full of Win!



SEGA Article is about 88 Pages!

i will get this fucking magazine no matter what, if just for the cover! damn ..

also Fumito Ueda comment about the article
http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2011/0 ... ega_mania/

and i was wondering why i love this man

[Pao]

I CANNOT BELIEVE no one uploaded the Binary Domain scans yet.

[Suzuki Yu]

^^
no one uploaded anything from this huge article, Japan Sucks <_<

[George]

I wish I could import a copy.. wait.. can I?

[Suzuki Yu]

I wish I could import a copy.. wait.. can I?

yes you can
i just pre-ordered my copy from Play-Asia with Portal 2(PC Asian Ver) to justify the shipment price -__-

[Barry the Nomad]

I do not see the issue on play-asia.com, could you provide a link Suzuki Yu?

I found this:
http://www.play-asia.com/Weekly_Famitsu ... -47tg.html

However it says it is issue 1165, and that cover above says 1170. Yet they both have the same date. Confusing!

[STORM!]

O-M-G!!!!

 ALIS LANDALE ON THE COVER OF FAMITSU IN THE YEAR 2011!!!

 THEMOSTAMAZINGTHING EVER MADE BY FAMITSU!!! ;___;

 I got the edition today, IT'S SO FUCKING HOT AND AWESOME!! THEY HAVE YU SUZUKI EVERYWHERE!! Naka Yuji back to comment on Sonic's 20th. A lot of people, but... not all of them.

 Yeah, the new Sega still being the new Sega. In the end, Famitsu is just a weekly magazine, and dont have much space to go to deeper. They were focused on the today Sega and series that still alive.

 I have not read it properly, but I have not seen legends like Rieko Kodama or Tokuhiko Uwabo on it... what a big mistake Famitsu! WHAT A BIG MISTAKE!  :|

 But this cover is EPIC!!!! :cry:

[Suzuki Yu]

^^
wow they did an interview with yu suzuki as well!

what about binary domain? how many pages? is there any new photos?

anything about PSO2 & Sonic Generations??

[Sharky]

I want that magazine...

[Sega Uranus]

Apparently Wacky World of Sports characters are more important than something from any IP created outside of Japan.

[Barry the Nomad]

Still wondering if the play-asia link on the previous page is the correct issue. Looks like famitsu releases the 5/12 issue on the week of 4/28? Also, their numbering looks to be off. Their 5/5 issue is 168, while their 5/12 issue is 170? Where did 169 go?

[Aki-at]

Probably deserves it's own topic but oh well, I'll upload it to the blog soon anyway, Ghost Squad sequel teased.

http://arcadeheroes.com/2011/04/27/sega ... -in-japan/

http://operation-ghost.sega.jp/



That's like, what, 5 games announced in the span of 2 weeks now?

[Alex Supersonic]

Wow that cover is epic! Someone provide the correct link on Play-Asia, I have to order this one

What does Yu Suzuki say in the interview?


Great find for Ghost Squad btw Aki!