The following is a round table discussion between seven key members of the Metal Gear: Ghost Babel development team that was published in Konami’s official Perfect Series guide. The discussion involves Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa themselves, as well a director Shinta Nojiri ,writer Tomokazu Fukushima, character designer and art director Ikuya Nakamura, assistant director Ryosaku Ueno, and graphic designer Juntaro Saito (aka JNT-HED of Team Fullmecha).



Special thanks to BadHumans on Twitter, for providing me with the interview. If you to see the interview in its original language, click here.



The Charm of Ghost Babel

Ueno: If we’re going to discuss the appeal of Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, we mustn’t forget its Vs. Battle (link cable) mode. You can’t see your rival unless you meet certain conditions, which brings out the appeal of a thrilling match-up.

Saito: If you play Vs. Battle, you will always end up quarreling with your friend. But in my opinion it’s a strong addictive element that you will end up playing again.



Shinkawa: In an ordinary fighting game, you exchange flashy moves with your opponent and if you’re convinced that you’re going to lose then I guess you’ll feel justified. But in this Vs. Battle mode, losing can be quite stressful.

Saito: On top of that, I’m no match against Nojiri. Usually if I compete against someone like Fukushima, even if I get shot, I can more or less calculate his position based on the direction where I got shot. But against Nojiri, he’s never where I expect him to be. He’s already concealing his presence like a ghost by that and I always end up getting blasted. How is he so good?

Kojima: That’s because Nojiri has a twisted personality. (laughs) Vs. Battle is a game mode where you learn how your rival thinks.

Nojiri: I don’t think it’s my personality, but rather the nature of Metal Gear itself… I think you should try to put yourself into the shoes of an enemy soldier in the game. Don’t they always get attacked from behind and end up killed without knowing what happened? They must never be convinced of that. That’s why being the player is fun. I think the greatest joy is savoring victory while your opponent is turning around left and right.

Ueno: The more twisted your personality is, the more enjoyment you get out of Vs. Battle mode (laughs).

Kojima: By the way, Black Arts Viper’s attack pattern was pretty nasty! I was shocked by his exploding floors. I died without knowing why when that happened! But the number one boss character was the prototype version of Slasher Hawk. We adjusted the difficulty nicely for the retail version, but he was too powerful during development.

Nakamura: Some of the enemy guards’ movement are quite nasty as well. Some guards act seem like they suddenly stopped, but then they yawn and look around left and right.

Ueno: There are four difficulty levels to choose from (Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard), but the overall game is pretty hard.

Nojiri: Is that so? I intended to make the game easy. The enemy soldiers were considerably stronger at one point to the point that they were called the invincible army corps, so I readjust them to be a lot weaker, and on top of that the number of enemy soldiers themselves were reduced on Easy and Normal.



Kojima: Has anyone other than Nojiri cleared the game on Very Hard?

Saito: I cleared it without using rations or equipping the body army

Everyone: Wow!

Nojiri: I kept improving while I was making the game and it got to the point that no one else could be a match for me. Everyone told me that I should come back to the real world. On top of that, I got too attached to the boss characters and I thought no one shouldn’t be able to defeat them… (laughs) With that said, perhaps that might had been reason for the high difficulty.



From Metal Gear Solid to Metal Gear: Ghost Babel

Ueno: There’s some unusual strategy techniques in the game, aren’t they? Is there a trick or something that can never be seen by the enemy.

Nojiri: The essence of the game is to confront the enemy soldiers without panicking. When your character is leaning on a wall (behind mode), you can scroll the screen to scout the area ahead of you. It’s just like the PlayStation version.

Fukushima: That’s because we carry the Metal Gear branding, so you can’t make something that isn’t like Metal Gear. The structure of the game is also a realistic style modeled after all the previous Metal Gear games. It’s hard to notice it, but there is about as much wireless [codec] conversations as there were in the PS version. In fact, Mei-Ling actually has more proverbs when you save… Her range of proverbs was expanded from just Chinese proverbs to international ones since it was difficult to display kanji characters on the Game Boy. [translator’s note: A similar change happened to the English language version of MGS1]

Nakamura: Speaking of which, when we decided to do a Metal Gear game on the Game Boy, one of the first issue that came up was how to do the graphics. Because the hardware specifications of the Game Boy are much weaker than the PlayStation, there was some consideration on using a comical graphic style instead of a realistic approach that would be technically difficult. However, the worldview of the Metal Gear that players are expecting is a realistic one as depicted by Yoji Shinkawa’s artwork on the PlayStation version, so we didn’t want to break that worldview with the Game Boy version. Despite all the difficulties, I think we were able to construct a serious world that doesn’t disappoint people’s expectations of the Metal Gear universe.

Shinkawa: Video games lately are being made of polygons. Metal Gear Solid was made in 3D and there were many things that were easy to do, but with Ghost Babel this time we wanted to reaffirm the charm that is only possible by 2D graphics.

Nojiri: Did you have any particular problem with drawing this time?

Shinkawa: Unlike MGS, where I had to design all the characters from scratch, for Ghost Babel I simply traced over Nakamura’s artwork, so there wasn’t any particular issue there. I was a bit concerned about Metal Gear Gander’s design, so I simply dug up a rough conceptual sketch that I drew for Metal Gear Rex.

Kojima: The Metal Gear mech this time looks like it came from outer space.

Shinkawa: Because a polygonal design ends up looking angular no matter what you do, so we contrasted that by taking advantage of the benefits of 2D and making it rounder this time. Other aspects of the Metal Gear, such as its long legs, the opening of the turret lids, and the circumstances of its changing form, came from game ideas.

Nojiri: Speaking of which, the law of the forest employed to create the backgrounds for the game was pretty amazing. I didn’t understand it at all at the time though.

Nakamura: Usually on a Game Boy games you create backgrounds by arranged 8x8 tiles, but I thought this might be too complicated. We assigned a different person to do the backgrounds, so when things he made turned out to be very different from what I was expecting, it became necessary to make a lot of corrections. Sometimes I would regret if i went too far. (laughs) But I think the overall quality improved.

Fukushima: I would be glad if you felt something after completely the game once. I’m not interest in what is simply consumed. Since there are many themes and such incorporated in multiple layers, perhaps you might notice things that you missed out if you replay the game after completing it once, or even see something completely different if you replay it years later.



Metal Gear from the Creator’s Perspective



Nojiri: When it came to the script, there were instances when he had change parts of the backstory, such as when we added new moves to the boss characters during development. Marionette Owl for example, was originally written to be a boss character who uses a dummy as a weapon, so I was surprised when I saw the illustration and they changed the dummy to a pair of bunraku puppets. (laughs)

Kojima: The character backstories were probably a bit dark. (laughs) I didn’t think they could had been depicted graphically.

Nakamura: Initially the boss characters consisted of just tall or older guys, so I took into consideration the Game Boy’s player demographic and made Owl into a young pretty boy. However, the reason his dummy became Bunraku puppets was because I was following Fukushima’s character backstory. (laughs)

Fukushima: It’s true that everyone often tells me that my backstories are dark. However, the game plan was actually written before I wrote the backstories. There were several proposals for boss characters, so we selected the ones that seemed the most fun for the game and then I wrote their backstories according to their plan. Usually you don’t really need to write a backstory for a boss character, but this was a Metal Gear game. In order to truly make it Metal Gear, it is necessary to write some backstories to an extent. Therefore the details are necessary to make Metal Gear like Metal Gear, they’re not just there for the sake of it. However, I have no interest in things that cannot become a medicine or a venom. So when it comes to creating one or the other, in my case, I choose the poison…

Nojiri: Saito-kun, since this was the first video game development project you were involved with, what were your impressions working on Ghost Babel?

Saito: It felt like I was doing bug checking, such trying to assist a friend in need of help as quickly as possible or trying to experiment with different ways of playing with this or that, I was surprised at how the solutions to those matters were prepared. I guess it was a rare game where you truly felt such level of commitment from the creators.

Nojiri: This time we worked the overseas versions at the same time, which proved to be a lot of trouble… (laughs)

Ueno: That’s right! Because of ROM size issues there was content included in the Japanese and European version that had to be cut out from the American version [TL’s note:likely referring to the IdeaSpy 2.5 codec drama], the amount of frames for the demo [cutscene] illustrations had to be limited, and even some specifications had to be cut with much regret.

Nojiri: Mr. Kojima, I believe you said that the reason we made Ghost Babel on the Game Boy was because of a request from overseas.

Kojima: Correct. It was a strange circumstance, but we received an order from a foreign distributor to make a Metal Gear game for the Game Boy. Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation sold around 5.5 million units The response was particularly amazing in Europe, where there a lot of passionate fans.

To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to do it at first. But up until that point we made games on several platforms such as the 3DO, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, PC Engine, MSX and the PC-9821, but not on the Game Boy. On top of that, another factor that I thought presented a good opportunity was the release of the new PlayStation 2 console, which is on everyone’s mind right now. In the age of hardware with multiple functionalities, more advanced technology is required even in the field of video game development, but by developing a game on a primitive hardware such as the Game Boy, I thought I would go back to my original intent and rethink what a game means.

Pretty much, a series of coincidences and persuasions piled up and that’s what Ghost Babel means for me.

Nojiri: In one sense it’s a point of failure, and in another it’s a point of success, but one feature of this is the amount of content that you don’t normally imagine from a mobile game. It’s a game where you can immerse yourself in the world of Metal Gear.

Finally, let’s have Mr. Kojima wrap this up.

Kojima: Ghost Babel has a classical image with its gameplay system that creates tension from not being found by the enemy, a deep script and beautiful graphic, but rather than being a remake of an old game that borrows from somewhere else, it’s a completely new work.

Moreover, I think one of its main feature is the fact that it’s portable Metal Gear that you can play anywhere at anytime without leaving your grasp. Fans of the previous Metal Gear games, as well as people unfamiliar with the series, should definitely check it out.

Conducted at KCE Japan West sometime in March 2000.

Staff