Portrait of Ruin interview
How does Dracula keep coming back? We go straight to the source
GR: Recently there was an interview on the Nintendo Europe website where you talked about the possibilities of Castlevania for Wii. I was wondering if you could comment on that.
KI: Let me start off. I guess that was when I was at the Games Convention in Germany. Most of the European press - I would say 97% - they asked the same question over and over again, and that was the question.
So according to my memory of Games Convention, everybody asked for Wii. "How about Castlevania on Wii?" So I said, this nunchuk controller is great. The Wii is very different and unique from the current game consoles. But then again a Castlevania game, usually the gamers tend to play one hour at least when you turn on the hardware, and thinking and doing this [motions like a whip], whipping with the nunchuk controller for more than an hour, would be tough. So what I said, is that if I was going to make a Wii game, probably I would be preparing some certain point where you use the nunchuk controller and the rest would be normal gameplay. That was it. The question comes back to what if I make Wii Castlevania. That's the only solution I've found.
And now talking about the next generation, Sony has just announced the discount of PS3 [in Japan], so now it's getting more chaotic, I guess, and it's really interesting.
GR: Do you have any opinion of the Wii vs. the PS3 vs. the 360? What do you think of the different systems?
KI: Let me just tell you that we're definitely going to work on next generation Castlevania. We want to. But the again, it comes down to what next-gen platform to work on. Brainstorming what we can do with various next-gen consoles and at this point it's really hard to narrow it down to one.
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So what I want to do is, is I want to come up with a solid game[play] system first and figure out on which platform it would work better.
So that's about it with next generation. I'm asking to get some comments - what's good and what's bad for Castlevania?
GR: Hmm. Well, we think that the PS3 would be best - the one thing that's slightly disappointing about the PS2 ones is that the graphics don't look like [character designer] Ayami Kojima's artwork. With the power of the PS3, you could make characters that really bring that beauty out and make it real.
KI: I see.
GR: You could make it look like a painting.
KI: Hmmm. A paint shader, probably. Let me get your ideas, and then make a proposal.