entrevista a Hideki Kamiya:
Bayonetta is more-or-less complete -- and the Japanese press loves it (although they love the PS3 port just a little bit less). Hideki Kamiya, director of the title at Platinum Games, is characteristically cool about it: "I think I'm pretty good as far as 3D action games go for a few years," he said with a laugh in a Famitsu interview this week.
"For me, this project was a rarity for me in that it didn't meander off in any strange direction," Kamiya continued. "We veered around a ton with Viewtiful Joe and Okami, looking back, but Bayonetta was really pretty smooth. I've never been involved with a sequel, so this was the first time I've retackled a genre I worked with before. It didn't make me nervous or anything, but it was sort of a re-examination of my past self. I was curious to see how it would all turn out in the end."
Like a lot of developers this generation, Kamiya had concerns about making a full-on console action game this generation. "Working in this generation has raised the hurdles pretty much everywhere," he said, "especially with programmers and designers having to step their games up for the hardware. It just takes time. I was worried if the staff could keep making games the way we always have -- starting from zero, building stuff and breaking it down -- and still stay sane. But once things got started, we found we were able to retain a very flexible environment, with ideas and sudden flashes of genius snowballing into new features quickly."
So what do players have to look forward to? "I don't want players to get too alarmed," said Kamiya, "but no matter what you do, you always tend to make a game really difficult as you polish it up. We wanted Bayonetta, the game, to respond as quickly as possible to you at all times, so it's frankly been tuned to be kind of twitchy. If someone handed you the game right now, I think it'd be a bit like he threw you into an F1 car. I want people to know that they may have to deal with that, and that they'll totally master it once they get into it."
Oh dear! It's not that tough, is it? As it turns out, not quite. "We were really concerned about being user-friendly in this game," Kamiya closed. "The game-over restart points won't crush your soul, there's no limit on continues, and you can change the difficulty on a per-stage basis, so I'd like gamers to trial-and-error their way through with that. Hardcore players thought easy-automatic mode made the game too simple during the demos, but don't worry -- we've got a lot in store for you types, too, so I hope you all get sliced up to ribbons in the retail release!"