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| XCN: Exclusive interview Ninety Nine Nights | // article | ||
| Though all the buzz at the Tokyo Game Show, we were able to sit down and chat with Tetsuya Mizuguchi (President of Q entertainment) and Sang Youn Lee (CEO of Phantagram) and we quizzed them on Ninety Nine Nights. XCN: Are all the characters in the opening trailer playable? Mizuguchi-san: Yes so here are the 6 players. (Points to horned demon character) This is not a playable character (room laughs)! One more character is a secret so you can play 7 characters! I think this is kind of a surprise. So we won't to tell about the last character! XCN: Will each character be able to play all levels or just specific levels unique to that character? Mizuguchi-san: So we will prepare 3 or 4 characters first and if you play those chapters first you can then get the new characters. Every character has this story, his own drama. They are in the same field, in the same war. There are five human characters and two non-humans. If you chose a goblin character, you will have a drama in a society of goblins. He has a family, friends and everybody talking about justice and human beings like "We hate them!" This is a kind of a mirror. XCN: So characters will meet each other on the battlefield? Mizuguchi-san: Yes. We spent almost one year to find a good scenario. We had to watch many aspects and adjust the scenarios. That was a long long way, but I think we now have a very good scenario. XCN: A lot of people have been comparing this to Dynasty Warriors. What do you think separates this game from the Dynasty-games? Sang Youn-Lee: They look very similar to the basic action. Speaking of action, in Ninety Nine Nights you fight against massive units compared to Dynasty Warriors. Compared to any other games. Including Dynast Warriors. So the goal of this game is to give some very dynamic feelings to the user who plays this game cause it deals with massive units. In this build we didn't show a feature, the guardian system. The guardian system is to control the troops, not just the character. By using such kind of guardian system, we can give more versatility to the gamers because we can show more various game styles. So each thing, each object, so we have this physics system too. We didn't show the feature properly in this build because we are still working on the physics engine right now. We can show it, you will see some examples when using the old spark feature. Every element, every object - they move according to the physics, it's just not an animation. Each element affects each other. For example, when the tree falls, the enemy under the trees gets killed. The goal of using a physics engine is to describe more reality, just like a real battlefield. When the player gets used to play this game, he can give more various strategies to... So, that's why it's different from Dynasty Warrior. The character are fighting against the enemy in wide fields, that's way they are pretty similar, but when you look more deep inside, the games gets totally different. XCN: When I played this on the show floor, the goblins actually dropped rocks on me, I didn't know that I could go up there and knock them down. Mizuguchi-san: Yeah, this kind of physics... yeah, this is just one sample stage, but we are preparing like a castle stage or snow fields. Many stages use physics effects, like canons, big explosions... Sang Youn-Lee: In the castle stage, the player can destroy every house, every building. Player can use strategy to destroy a wall of the castle, to kill many enemies. Mizuguchi-san: Like Phantagram's Kingdom Under Fire - that is 80% strategy and 20% action. In Ninety Nine Nights, it's 80% action and 20% strategy. Dynasty Warriors is very historical, but this is a fantasy. You can use the natural powers, like water, fire, the wind and you can beat the enemies, thousands of enemies.
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