In an interview with Gamespot, Hideki Kamiya had revealed that Scalebound had been in the conception stage as early as 2006, roughly around the time Platinum Games was formed, saying it was the game he always wanted to make.

During that time, he had a completely different idea of what the game was gonna be like, initially having it feature a little girl who was controlling dinosaurs, and would have been developed for the Wii.

“When they first started, the idea was for a Wii game and we wanted to use a Wii remote to do the orders for the dinosaurs […] You were in control of the dinosaurs, you were ordering the dinosaurs around, and they’d do cool things. Then after we made Bayonetta, we started the prototype. The first thing that I made a change to was making it a dragon game.”

The reason for the change came when Kamiya wanted the protagonist to be a part of the combat and simply not a spectator.

“We changed the dinosaurs to dragons, but at that point the lead character was even weaker than [current protagonist] Drew is in the context of Scalebound […] She was actually a little girl who was with these dragons. As we were making this prototype, I realized that I didn’t want to just be watching the fight, I wanted to be more participatory in the fight. And I started talking with the staff about how maybe we should change this to be a swordsman or someone a little bit older. This was when the prototype got put on the backburner, so to speak, and the project was halted. Then we made The Wonderful 101.”

It’s always interesting seeing the process of a game changing dramatically as development continues and ideas change. We’ll probably never see what this original idea might have looked like, but maybe we’ll see a future project with this character in mind.

Scalebound is set to release exclusively on Xbox One sometime in late 2016.