[quote]Playing Japan's Game

By Chris Kohler| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Oct, 09, 2006

TOKYO -- Koji Igarashi, the producer of Konami's Castlevania has a problem: Should the next installment of the storied franchise stick with Sony and its new PlayStation 3 console, or take a gamble on a hot new contender?

Fans are constantly asking him to bring the popular series and its whip-toting hero to Nintendo's new Wii device, he said, but it's not at all obvious to him how to build such a game.

Motion detection, the system's coolest feature, has opened the door to a whole new kind of short-form entertainment mimicking real sports such as tennis. But that's actually proving hard to work into narrative games like Castlevania, Igarashi said. If he were to create a version for Wii, he would be inclined to use the tilt controls only sparingly.

"With the Castlevania designs, I always want to have players sit and focus on gameplay for an hour or so," he said. "But using the Wii controller as a whip for one hour wouldn't work."

The console wars have handed game designers a conundrum: Of the three major new platforms vying for dominance, which one is the right for them?

Microsoft is making grand overtures to Japan's gamers, but has met with rejection thus far. And Sony's dominant PlayStation brand faces its toughest competition ever in Nintendo's inexpensive Wii console and its motion-tracking remote.

The question goes well beyond expected console sales. In Japan, simple short-form games suitable for portable devices have lately trounced complex, multilayered games that appeal to the hard-core gaming audience. That's thrown up in the air the future of some of the industry's bestselling series titles, as developers look to court the masses with easier games that don't require a lot of time to master.

At the recently concluded Tokyo Games Conference here, top Japanese developers admitted they don't know which way the future lies.

"It's a more chaotic situation than ever," Igarashi said.

The Wii offers a case in point. The system has drawn raves from reviewers since it was announced at E3, and its simple, intuitive interface is expected to create a whole new class of easy-to-play games that could push the industry into new markets by appealing to parents and even grandparents as well as kids and teenagers. But it is not at all clear whether such a system can work with more traditional games, let alone expand their appeal beyond the hard-core crowd.

Game designer Atsushi Inaba shares Igarashi's concerns. "I think many people in Japan have this feeling that Nintendo's Wii is going to do very well," he said. "The reaction to Wii at E3 was very positive, but they were playing games that were three or four minutes long. Whether you can make a game for Wii that somebody's going to be able to play for an hour or two hours, nobody knows."

Inaba's former co-worker Goichi Suda, now head of head of indie dev studio Grasshopper Manufacture, believes that he can.

"When we saw the Wii controller, we were really excited about it," said Suda. In his game, called Heroes, you'll use the remote to swing the main character's sword. Suda points out that he'll balance this gameplay so the player doesn't get tired.

Though it presents some challenges to traditional game design, Wii is just the sort of market-expanding product that has been buoying the Japanese game industry of late. After a decade of decline, Japan's game sales are creeping back up again -- but entirely on the strength of cell-phone games, which dominated vast swaths of the TGS show floor, and Nintendo's popular DS hardware.

Meanwhile, the future of the home game-console business -- long the bread and butter of Japan's game market -- is in serious doubt.

"I think the announcement that PlayStation 3 will be cheaper in Japan shows that Sony's feeling a bit of pressure," said Inaba. "They're starting to realize that just because PS2 sold well doesn't mean that PS3 will do as well."

"I don't think we'll see what we did with PS2," said Igarashi, "where a lot of casual gamers bought it because they wanted (the built-in) DVD player. I don't think this formula works" for the Blu-Ray based PlayStation 3, he said.

Which is another reason why Igarashi doesn't know where to put his next Castlevania game. "I'm seeing the Wii as the most successful next-gen platform in Japan," he said, "but we have a lot of gamers from North America, and we need to focus on them."

Could that mean that Castlevania might end up on the American-made Xbox 360? Although it's done well in the United States and Europe, Microsoft's console has been a total flop in Japan, only selling through about 150,000 units since its launch last year.

"I'd like to see 360 sell better in Japan," said Inaba, who designed Capcom's Viewtiful Joe games. "My personal opinion is that people who really like games might end up buying 360."

In a market trending ever more toward games simple enough for your grandma, Inaba makes it a point to tailor his work to "people who really like games" -- these days a hard-core, even niche, audience. His new game, God Hand, is "not an easy game at all."

"Lately in Japanese games," said Inaba, "there's been this trend towards not ever dying. In God Hand, you're going to die quite a lot. And that's planned." The game's enemies, he says, "are almost unbelievably hard to defeat."

God Hand shipped in Japan the week prior to TGS, and sold about 60,000 copies -- solid numbers for a hard-core game, but nowhere near the multi-millions enjoyed by the likes of Brain Training.

And it's a far cry from the numbers that hard-core oriented street fighting games like God Hand would have enjoyed 10 years ago, when the industry was at its peak.

"I'm not worried about hard-core games disappearing," said Inaba. "We haven't been hearing people say, 'I was deceived, this isn't the game I thought it would be.' People are enjoying it," he said.

Goichi Suda also wants to serve the hard core with Heroes, which will echo the unique blend of stylish, off-kilter ultraviolence and unorthodox gameplay action seen in his 2004 game Killer 7.

"There aren't many violent games for Wii, even though there's a need for them," said Suda. "I think people will be happy to find other genres on Wii, and I think Nintendo will appreciate it."

In Suda's Heroes, the main character is the world's 10th-best assassin. To move up the ranks, he decides to kill the other nine. The assassin's only weapon is a "beam katana," which bears a strong resemblance to a certain trademarked weapon of sci-fi fame.

Suda sees Wii's inexpensive, simpler development environment as a boon to indie creators. "It takes a lot more people" to make a PS3 game, he said. "It's going to be really hard for developers my size. With the size of the teams we have, making a Wii game makes more sense."