Blazblue: European launch interview with United Zen CEO Tomo Ohno: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

|This interview was conducted on March 3rd 2010, during the course of a press event in Cologne, held by Headup Games, the German publisher of Blazblue: Calamity Trigger. It was conducted by Adrian Ruth (Kuroko) and David Huggele (ATG) for www.hardedge.org, the biggest German Fighting Game community. Before the interview, Tomo Ohno held an introductory speech and outlined Zen United's work in Europe, emphasizing that the late European release of Blazblue: Calamity Trigger is necessary in order to gather feedback about the market, which Arcsystem Works isn't accustomed to yet.

= Interview Topics =

 

 

 

 

== Older Arcsystem Works games on XBL/PSN ==  

|Xbox Live and Playstation Network are very popular platforms. Have you thought of bringing older Arcsystem Works fighting games to XBOX Live or Playstation Network?

|This is a very interesting drawing. As you can see this is just regular printer paper. On some of them - there is actually a print on the back. You know, they used misprints to work with (laughs). This is an original drawing that the main artist did. Then she hands it to the assistant artist, and he creates the animation. For example, this is litchi: This is her animation for jump spin and land (shows us sketches of her j.B), for that you need 15 drawings. A B C and so on.

|This is very interesting. Arcsystem Works is famous for their attention to detail. If you take Guilty Gear, you have all these single frame animation-"easter-eggs", like those of Zappa and Axl.  

|The Taito Type X2 board has been pirated and Blazblue: Continuum Shift has been leaked. How bad is it; and what is Arcsystem Works' stance towards the whole thing?

|Arcsystem Works has been giving some hints in recent interviews that there might be a followup to Guilty Gear Overture. You described before how everybody at ASW is working on everything, whatever is needed, so I was wondering, is there a "Fighting Game Team" at ASW, and some other team that does all the smaller games?

|Also, Carl's purpose is quite interesting. The boy with the Robot. We are actually aiming at women. Late teens, early twenties. They associate themselves with the robot, they like helping the young boy. So... there's a unique and also strange culture in Japan. There is a huge community of girls who write manga, and sell things, and most of them have something to do with young boys. I don't know much about it. (laughs)

|So anyway. This works in Japan but it doesn´t work in Germany. (laughs) so our next challenge is to create something while adapting to the German (international) community. As I explained before, we need to know you better, starting with the hardcore community. We have to start with the hardcore comunity anyway. so in your community: we want to see what the things are that excite you.

|Next Guilty Gear - whatever it's going to be called - will be designed to sell it globally. Japan, of course, will be the most important country. But we want to have some sort of mechanism before to gather feedback, request the wishlist so we can extend it to the design colaboration. Not many companies succeded on developing in market in the location yet. So that's Guilty Gear for us. It's a huge  challenge, but we will try to get the user involved somehow. so we are counting on you guys. (laughs) Come up with something!

we hope we can be helpful (laughs)

|You know the Natal. There are lots of things to think of. We are bringing Daisuke Ishiwatari to Europe. His mission is to meet people of the scene and see what it is like. For us, it's quite surprising to visit the gamestores in germany aswell. The store looks totally different (from Japanese ones). When the store looks that different, how do you sell things? In Japan the stores are quite small, but they have lots of games. So people look at the covers from a close distance. Here - Mediamarkt - Huuuge (laughs). So you see the game from almost 3~5 Meters away. So if you pick too many  characters for the box art, you can´t really see it well. That's something I learned about the German games. The games have one huge picture but its easier to identify. You see, this is one small thing we learned when we came here to visit.

|A personal question for the end: Arcsystem Works did the Hokuto No Ken video game, and we all thought that it worked out really well and that Arcsystem Works' takes on other IPs a very interesting and cool. If you could pick one of your favourite mangas or movies or something else that ASW would make a fighting game to. what would it be?

|You know, Tatsunoko - I grew up with them. That was something I  grew up with. strangely, when you saw the animations when you were a kid, they looked so real.  You lived in that world. If you look at them now, well... (laughs) So, you know, I personally wouldn't want to see something i enjoyed so much when I was a kid now see in the Arcsystem style. Especially since Capcom took them all (laughs)

''All concept art © Arcsystem Works, used with permission from Zen United & Tomo Ohno.''