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In an interview with Siliconera, the creators of Project Rap Rabbit, Masaya Matsuura and Keiichi Yano, discussed how they initially designed the game with humans in mind, rather than animals.
Matsuura said the idea was to always set the game in 16th century Japan, and as Yano puts it, ‘By utilizing actual history, we’re kinda deriving a lot of our own stories and our design from actual history, so it makes it easy for us to turn those into templates for modern themes that we might want to address.’
But at the beginning, ‘we tried to design human characters’, Matsuura stated, before Yano added, ‘When you’re using human protagonists, essentially whatever scenarios we come up with that come from history, they’re real, right? Sometimes they’re not the most pleasant things.’
‘If we do base things exactly off of history, we can’t do those sorts of things in the game!’ Matsuura pointed out. ‘It’s different from our basic style of the game design concept, so we decided to replace the characters into animals.’
Eminem apparently gets a shoutout in-game, according to Yano, adding that protagonist Toto-Maru ‘made a lot of sense,’ saying Marshall Mathers ‘used to be called like a Rap Rabbit.’
The massive frog you’ve seen in screenshots and the teaser videos? Yano says ‘that was somebody going, “Well that’s a rabbit…let’s try a frog!”‘
Fair play.
With 25 days to go on the crowd-funding service, Project Rap Rabbit has a bit to go to reach its Kickstarter goal. And with the furore surrounding the Nintendo Switch stretch goal, it’s touch-and-go if this collaboration from the people behind PaRappa and Gitaroo Man will come out. All will be clear in less than a month.
