[Terada P X Nasu Kinoko] Why did SRW's producer refuse when Anno said "Put Char in an Evangelion"? The conflict between the source material and games, and what FGO inherited from SRW

http://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/kikakuthetower/170731

The servants of Fate are born from the fun of broadly interpreting throwaway lines in legends

Terada: I like Teito Monogatari, and that too fused real people with original characters, so that you start to really think "The writer Kouda Rohan fought monsters". The same applies to Journey to the West, but if you want to put a real person into fiction, you have to really learn about that person first. With robot anime you can just watch the show and read the information, but with real people, and especially recent people, I think it turns out that a lot of them turn out to be different from what you expect. That's why while I like stuff like Makai Tenshou which has real people in fiction, I think it'd be too difficult for me to pull off.

-We'd like to hear about how Fate was made

Nasu: Fate was just a denki novel (literary genre generally with occult stuff that has its root in legends or mythology) turned into a game. 80's denki novels, including Teito Monogatari had a common theme of "this stuff happened behind the scenes in actual history", which meant stories based on real events. This doesn't really apply to denki novels from the 00's and on, but the initial idea for Fate was made just at the end of that age, and is about stuff hidden behind modern society, and the heroic spirits are based on history. It's made to be loved by people interested in mythology and great figures from history. But lately I've been starting to hear questions like "Who is King Arthur?"…

Terada: Really?

Nasu: That's just how much the amount of basic knowledge users have has changed. We were making things based on an outdated format, and just hadn't realised it.

-Do you think there are people who didn't know who King Arthur was, who first grew to like Saber from Fate and then went and studied King Arthur?

Nasu: I think most people should have at least heard of King Arthur's name. When it comes to more minor characters, I hope that people can enjoy Fate by starting with "literally who?" and then looking them up and going "oh, that's how the legend goes" "they interpreted this part of the legend that way".

Terada: The level of reality is totally different, and you do learn about history. "There's no way someone like this could have really existed… They did!?".

Nasu: Just studying this stuff is fun. Some of these historical figures are really amazing, just loaded with anecdotes that make you go "what is this, a comic book?". Before FGO, if I wanted to have 14 heroic spirits I'd buy two books for each of the characters and read those, but FGO has over 150 and it's basically just world history at this point. I certainly wouldn't be able to handle this on my own, so I called up a few writers I could trust and we bought a load of books and spent a year studying them. It was a crazy start, but thanks to that we grew to understand historical figures much better, and were able to apply that to the writing.

[The game elements forming Fate's base were derived from SRW's seishin commands]

Terada: Do you have any basis for choosing heroic spirits?

Nasu: Early on Fate was story first, and the basis for choosing them was whether or not they'd be good to express the story. But lately we have so many that we're just going "alright, who don't we have yet?". First, famous people that everbody knows about. Next, not famous but cool. After that, those who fit the story and plot. Usually these three patterns. But every once in a while an artist suddenly sends over a piece of art saying they just drew a heroic spirit even though nobody asked them to, and these are usually really good, and so we decide to put them in and make it official.

Terada: Similar things happen in SRW too. "Put this series in SRW" "The rights for those are difficult" "I'll handle that" and they really handle it. The request for Kuntam Robo to show up in SRW was from Nakashima Kazuki, saying he'd persuade Usui Yoshito himself. If I went back in time 15 years and showed myself Baron Ashura talking to Shin-chan in X-O, the past me would definitely have thought it to be a silly photoshop. It's hard to wedge things in to the main SRW series, but with X-O we can just cut out a small scenario. Like with Zyuranger, we obtain the understanding of the source material's owners and break the walls obstructing inclusion in SRW with X-O.

-Fate's characters don't just have personalities, but also parameters and "equipment" (noble phantasms), which are game-like elements, which could be said to be similar to SRW.

Nasu: Reviving heroes from the past may have begun with Makai Tenshou, but there are a lot of other works that do the same thing. I think the reason why Fate out of all of these became popular was because of the game-like elements. I like RPGs, so I thought that instead of just reviving seven people, I'd like to have some game-like restrictions on them. That resulted in the seven classes, and parameters, and noble phantasms. All of these basically make it so that the characters are treated as units in a game with risks and returns balanced out. I think that's the biggest reason Fate was successful. When I first played SRW4, what amazed me the most was the existence of the seishin commands. Simply by looking at a character's seishin commands, you can tell what their personality is like and what makes them unique. Of course this character has Love, I figured that that character would have Kiai (raising one's spirits), it's a fantastic method of expression. It works as a game system, but also expresses the characters. The idea of being able to express a character through the rules of a shared format was revolutionary to me, and I wanted to use this in many things. Many things in SRW influenced me, but this was the biggest element.

-I see, so the parameters in Fate were influenced from SRW. How were the seishin commands born, anyway?

Terada: Well they're basically just magic from RPGs. But we can't have, say, Kabuto Kouji using fire magic, so we changed the names. Seishin commands represent the characters' seishin (spirit, mentality, personality), but if we went purely that way then almost all robot anime protagonists would have Hot Blood. That would be silly, so we do put in a few game-centric adjustments, like deciding that someone should have Spirit instead. Using the seishin commands to represent personalities was something done more in the past, when we'd purposely put in commands nobody would even think to use, like Heero's Self-Destruct. But while there've been a lot of seishin commands lately, I personally feel that it'd be better to have just around 30, and try to figure out how to use just those.

Nasu: If you have a character with their own unique seishin command, it all starts to slide away from having everything take place in one world. In Fate each class has its own skills, but sometimes there's a servant who doesn't match these skills, and we give them their own unique ones, but this results in everyone starting to have their own unique skills and this means there's no point in having a shared format. It's because everyone has to use the same base materials that it's fun as a game.

Terada: That's a real dilemma. For example, cases like with the word "miracle" being emphasised so much in Top wo Nerae's source material that we have no choice but to include it. That being said, we do need some commitment, like in the case of a character who would be hard to use without Hot Blood, but has a personality where there's no way that they'd have Hot Blood.

Terada: The thing is, when I see how the Fate series got so many new fans with FGO, I start to wonder if we ought to change it after all. But we have a lot of things we have to consider as a long-running series. In a situation where it's hard for new people to come in, we of course try to do new things, but in SRW the source material comes first. There are plenty of ideas (putting whether or not they'd work aside) that would break the stagnation in SRW. For example, letting Mazinger use Gundam weapons. But these aren't things we didn't think of, it's things we decided not to do. As a character-centric game, we can't ignore the fans of the source materials. We'd be told "if you want to do that make your own original series". As respect to the creators of the source materials, there's that line that we just can't cross. Meanwhile in Fate, King Arthur is a woman.

Nasu: And Edison's a lion.

Terada: That's really great. I mean, it's amazing.

-SRW respects the source material, but Fate seems to have cases where characters are nothing like the source, like having lion heads. Is there a policy or way of thinking applied here?

Nasu: It's all having fun with broad interpretations. For example, in the myth, we have just two lines: "Cuck Wholain's has a spear named Gay Borg. It always pierces his enemy's heart and makes it burst". This means that we can interpret these two lines however we want. That's why I was always against turning figures from more recent times into servants, because they're more firmly recorded in history. But the number of servants in FGO has grown so much that we're breaking that taboo. Meanwhile, mythology is really just lines of "settings" which we can broadly interpret. I figured that these leaps of logic would be great stimulus for users. Eventually "I would never have thought of that" and "I thought of that too" spread out and users can play at making up their own servants. I don't think we're really breaking the characters, but taking simple lines from mythology and giving you a presentation saying "wouldn't it be fun if you could take this to mean this". And no matter how minor a hero is, we don't forget to respect them. The core is that they were someone worthy of being spoken of to this day, and we have them act as heroes within that boundary.

-You mentioned things you decided not to do in SRW like having Mazinger using Gundam weapons. What else is there?

Terada: Having pilots swap over to other series is difficult too. If asked if Amuro Ray could pilot Mazinger Z,I'd have to say that since Amuro is great at piloting humanoid weapons, he certainly would. But if asked if that's a wall we should break, I'd be lost for an answer. It would be really fun if we could do it. If all sorts of different people could pilot the Getter Robo's Eagle, Jaguar and Bear, of course it'd be really fun.

Nasu: Amuro, Char and Hamaan in the Get Machines would absolutely be fun!

Terada: You could also consider whether to play that straight or as a joke. For example if there was a serious situation where those three just happened to have no choice but to pilot the Getter Robo, I think people would be alright with it. But it'd be difficult to figure whether or not Char and Hamaan should yell "open get" when it splits up. I want to have them yell it, at least.

Nasu: If it's done that well, I'd say it'd be totally fine to have it for one stage or something. But even if it's done that well, if the source owners say no then the efforts of the staff are all wasted, so I guess it's hard to take that step.

Terada: We can't break the source material without the permission of the source material's stuff. I only met Anno once, twenty years ago, but when that happened he said he had two things to ask for me. The first was to put Char in an Evangelion, but I replied "I thought you have to be under 14 to pilot an Evangelion" and he went "Oh!". The second was to have Bright punch Shinji, and this we actually did in SRWF. Shinji says "not even my dad hit me before!" and Amuro looks uncomfortable. If we didn't have permission from Anno we couldn't have done that. Some think we ought to remove this limitation, but I've been protecting this line for the last 25 years. These aren't our series.

Nasu: It's like having a cake and not being able to eat it.

Terada: The Getter Robo thing from just now, I think if we really made it it'd be great. But there are other crossovers that I think went really well without going that far. For example, having everyone show up to save Asuka when she's being beaten by the mass production Evangelions in Alpha was something I wanted to do from the beginning, because when I watched the movie I kept hoping someone would show up to save her. But that too changes the flow of the source material so I was really conflicted about it.

Nasu: But the SRW series has to have "if Amuro were here he'd say this". I haven't played SRWV yet, but a writer I know told me "V's really good so hurry up and play it, all the female characters from a load of different series gang up on Embryo from Cross Ange". If a load of heroines from a bunch of different series were there, of course they'd do that. What makes SRW so great is having situations everyone wants to see, while inserting characters who act the way they should.

Nasu: Another great thing about SRW is how Mazinger Z's Breast Fire gets better each time. Every time you see it you think it can't get any better, and then the next game comes out and it does. The ability to keep the flavour of the source material while converting it so that contemporary users can be fully satisfied with it is really magnificent. The ability of the staff to make great storyboards and then bring that to life in 2D is amazing.

Terada: With Mazinger Z we really wonder about how to change it each time. But the same applies to the Fin Funnels, we've basically managed to replicate all of the source material and the person in charge now has to wonder how to change it each time.

Nasu: The Fin Funnels are so simple, just small machines flying around shooting lasers. And yet they still manage to get better each time, so I have to really wonder how far you can go with this format.

-What sort of histories do the staff handling battle animations have? Are they game industry graphics people?

Terada: Yes, but a few are from the anime industry.

Nasu: FGO's battles are 2D too, and we're aiming for battle animations that the users want to see, but so far we're still coming up with what can be expected. SRW on the other hand keeps coming up with stuff overwhelming exceeding expectations, making me feel that this is what it really means to be excited, and that's what's so great about it.

Terada: Still, there are time and budget constraints… What we have is really mild compared to what we really want to do.

Nasu: Seriously!?

Terada: There are lots of things we could still do, but trying to do it would mean running out of time. We tried to do too much in Alpha.

Nasu: Alpha's battle animations were really amazing for the time… They were the stuff of dreams.

-SRW's battle animations clearly are on a different level from other simulations and RPGs.

Terada: The thing is, though, that they sometimes get too long. I've been asked what the point is of putting so much effort into things that people skip after they see it once…

Nasu: When the final boss has an attack that lasts 40-50 seconds I do skip it after seeing it once. But I think that that animation exists entirely for that one time. It's the end of a long journey, you have to show us the very best.

Terada: It's not rare for people to watch a movie only one time, so it's not like we want people to watch the same battle animations over and over again… It's difficult.

-The battle animations get more impressive each time. Is the number of staff members increasing as well?

Terada: Yes, but not by that much. It's mostly worksmanship. I was previously told that we have enough 2D graphics people, but we're always short on 3D graphics people because of the smartphone game. From the point of view of a developer though I have to say that running a smartphone game is way harder than making a console game. I'm involved with X-O too and it's fearsome.

Nasu: With a smartphone game it's like every day is a deadline. We've only been going for two years, and it makes me feel amazed at the stamina and management ability of the staff of other games that have been going for 3-4.

-Is making console and PC games different from making smartphone games?

Nasu: How the users are treated is completely different. With console games, users sit down at a screen with the intention of eating a meal. Meanwhile, smartphones are a part of everyday life, and users want things faster, lighter, more compact. Despite knowing that, FGO goes "that's that and this is this, I'm taking an hour of your time".

(Not part of the interview: Other interviews regarding FGO have had Nasu and other staff talk about how the earlier chapters having short story sequences interrupted by random battles all the time came from how they thought this was how smartphone games are supposed to work; Users absolutely hated this and they changed it so that story sequences are now longer and have less interruptions, and there are entire chapters without battles at all, and "random wyverns attacking" has now become a running joke)

-So you're worried about how modern users think playing video games is too much trouble

Nasu: Games, FGO and SRW included, work on a system in which players use their time and concentration and trial and error to gain success. But in FGO we got messages from users saying "why is this game's system so troublesome?". Smartphone players think that games should have no stress at all. This made me realise how my way of seeing things was too old. Meanwhile, when you play recent SRW titles you can make a lot of progress really fast which is still fun, but I can't help but feel that this is sacrificing the feeling of "forty minutes and the Blood Temple still isn't dead!?". What do you think about this?

Terada: That's true. I think games are supposed to be based upon a cycle of building up and releasing stress, though I don't think this applies to ALL games. If you give the users only stress they say it's repetitive, and I've been told that we should make a mode where you start off with maximum everything, and I do think that smartphone games should have auto-play functions. But SRW is at its base a niche game. 25 years ago I was told "nobody's going to buy such a niche game", and I fought against that, and I think we should hold on to that core aspect and seek ways of having fun that only SRW can have.

Terada: FGO's events are really popular, aren't they.

Nasu: We basically do an event every month. Most smartphone games have weekly events, but FGO has large events that serve as the main dish of the month. Everyone is always excited for the first week, and then they return to routine work for the next three. That time's to let them raise their characters to prepare for the next feast.

-There was an event where only players who cleared Part 1 could participate, which was pretty shocking for a smartphone game. (CCC event)

Nasu: Only about 40% of players managed to participate in that. But nothing lasts forever, and I'm satisfied as long as those who managed to play it have it in their memories. Meanwhile those who didn't manage to play it can be excited for next year. We made it so that you had to have cleared Part 1 simply because you can't enjoy the event's greatest gimmick without having done so. It's an answer to players who said the end of Part 1 was great. I'm sorry to say this to new users but events like CCC are made for people who cleared Part 1, as a reward for them.

-Some would say you should let them play it even if they don't get it.

Nasu: It's okay if they don't get a bit of it, but with a long story that's not good at all. Eating something you don't get just makes you feel sick, and it's a waste. I'd rather have them wait a year and let them go "people were eating such a delicious steak last year!". It's like playing SRW without knowing any of the series in it at all, a huge amount is lost for both the players and creators.