Resonance of Fate Interview

At SEGA’s recent Summer Sizzler showcase event in London, it took the lid off upcoming role-playing game Resonance of Fate. Developed by tri-Ace, the team behind the Square Enix-published Star Ocean series and Infinite Undiscovery, the game is intended to appeal to westerners just as much as Japanese gamers. After a live gameplay demonstration, impressions of which you can find here, we sat down with SEGA Europe’s localisation producer Jun Yoshino, who’s in charge of making sure westerners like you and me enjoy the game when it eventually comes out, to get more detail on this promising gun-toting steampunk adventure.

VideoGamer.com: Tell us about yourself and your role on the game.

Jun Yoshino: I’m the localisation producer. I’m pretty much in charge of development with regards to all the localisation for EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish). I’m based in Brentford at SEGA Europe.

VideoGamer.com: What was it about Resonance of Fate that convinced SEGA to publish it?

JY: You’re probably well aware that tri-Ace, usually all their games, which are all RPGs, they’re published through Square Enix. But this time a different publisher was chosen. I can’t really say exactly because I wasn’t there, but two things were, this time round they’re making an RPG that’s slightly different from their usually fantasy RPG, so it was a different game. And also the development team wished to branch out more into the western market. If you only think about JRPGs doing well in the west there’s only Final Fantasy. There’s not much else out there that does so well. But obviously we don’t have that historical IP to work with.

So, it’s a brand new IP and the devs are open to suggestions from us. So it wasn’t really just arranging an EFIGS localisation for them, but localisation to the degree where we’ll have an influence on the actual game as well. We always were discussing at the early stages of development – we looked into western games and what people look for in a game over here. What people didn’t like about Japanese games is a big discussion point. We tried to fine tune it so western users won’t be put off by a complex system or just tiny little frustrations people might find over here in Japanese RPGs.

VideoGamer.com: Any examples?

JY: Long grinding sessions, repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again. We had one bit where you enter a dungeon and then you play through the dungeon, you beat the boss, and then people expect over here once you beat the boss that’s the end of the dungeon. The initial system was you had to navigate yourself out of the dungeon. Once all the excitement is finished and you’ve done everything you have to walk out. So we put an item in there that you can find within the dungeon to teleport yourself out once you’ve beaten the boss. Little things like that.

Having various save points – it’s always frustrating where you have to play hours and hours then you can’t save anywhere. And then you die and you lose all the progress you’ve made. So we’ve arranged for many different save points in different areas. We didn’t make it easy for people to access, but we’ve made the game more accessible.

VideoGamer.com: You won’t be able to save whenever you want, but there will be lots of save points?

JY: Yeah. We’re still playing around with it. We might leave the function in there that you can just press pause. If you want to stop playing and turn your 360 or PS3 off, you can just save when you quit the game so when you come back you’ll be in the exact same place. Obviously you can’t do it mid battle, but wherever you are on the world map, so you can press pause and save at that point, turn off your machine, come back and you’ll be where you were. You don’t have to go all the way back to a save point and come back round again.

We’ve really taken all of those things into account. We just want people to easily access all the good parts of the game, all the fun parts. People can jump in and out and just have fun with it really.

VideoGamer.com: Is the idea to set Resonance of Fate up as a franchise?

JY: That all pretty much depends on what happens really. If that does happen and we were able to establish this as a strong IP then by all means we’ll do that. We’re taking our chances with new ideas and things and we’ll just see how it goes from there.

VideoGamer.com: When is it coming out?

JY: Early 2010 is what I can say now.

VideoGamer.com: And it’s 360 and PS3?

JY: Yes that’s right.

VideoGamer.com: Is the idea that it’ll be simultaneous release on both consoles?

JY: Yes.

VideoGamer.com: Will it be out at the same time across the world?

JY: No. Obviously with a huge game play length, as a role-playing game, it’s very hard to do all the localisation and languages at the same time. But we’ve been working really hard, putting in long hours, so the release difference, the time gap, will be as small as possible. I can’t really think of another JRPG with as small a time gap as what we’re doing.

VideoGamer.com: So there won’t be a massive gap between the Japanese release and the western release?

JY: No not at all.

VideoGamer.com: One of the things that annoy European JRPG fans is that games often come out in Europe after the US. How will it work with this game?

JY: We want to avoid that. America and Europe is the same release. It’s because not just taking the game into account when we were trying to make it more appealing to the west, it’s also the release time as well. Usually the European version comes a year after, let’s say the Japanese release. During the year, a lot of people are going to like, well this is old news now. We’re going to be losing a lot of interest if there is such a long time as a year. We’ve scheduled it in so we can get it out as quick as possible.

VideoGamer.com: Any plans for a PC version?

JY: I can’t comment on that [SEGA UK PR: no plans].

VideoGamer.com: Can you quantify how large the game world is?

JY: It’s hard to say how big it is. It is large. It is quite immense. If you’re speaking of time wise, to explore everything I would probably say about 80 hours, just to explore every nook and cranny of the game world. Side missions are up to you, but the more you do you get more fragments of the map you can use.

VideoGamer.com: Does the 80 hours include the side missions?

JY: Yeah. Everything, like a full play through, will be about 80 plus, depending on the person obviously. It is a big game.

VideoGamer.com: Will it come on one disc on the Xbox 360?

JY: Yes. That’s the idea.

VideoGamer.com: Traditionally JRPGs have really nice looking FMVs. Will Resonance of Fate have these or will all cutscenes use the game engine?

JY: It’s both. There are in-game cut scenes, and there’s also FMV. tri-Ace has always made visually stunning stuff. Obviously the FMV parts are much higher quality, but the in-game cut scenes are quite polished already – it’s 70 per cent done – and it’s looking really impressive. It’s just going to look better and better as we polish up the game.

VideoGamer.com: Is the idea to have full voice acting for the western version, or just text?

JY: We will have English American voices. Unfortunately, just to squeeze it in, because we wanted to keep the gap small, some things will be text. But we know that a lot of JRPG fans just play with the Japanese voice overs on with the subtitles anyway. The hardcore fans will definitely use that. We left that in as an option. Japanese voices will be on the western release as well. People have a choice. I’m sure a lot of the hardcore fans will want to play it in Japanese.

Resonance of Fate is due out for Xbox 360 and PS3 early 2010.