Ubi Soft Entertainment recently conducted an interview with Takeshi Miyaji and Katsunori Saito. Arisa Furugen, Japanese project coordinator, was on hand to translate, as well as John Chowanec, US brand manager.

Q: Can you please start by introducing yourselves?

Miyaji: My name is Takeshi Miyaji from Game Arts in Tokyo. Pleased to meet you all.

Saito: My name is Katsunori Saito from Game Arts and I did the direction of Grandia II. I am very excited to be here for this opportunity to talk to you all.

Q: What were your roles/responsibilities for the production of Grandia II?

Miyaji: I am the producer for Grandia II.

Saito: I acted as the supervisor for the 200-person Grandia II development team. We broke our large team into smaller teams and it was my responsibility to oversee the heads of the smaller teams to assist them in elaborating on the game's scenarios.

Q: Can you give us an overview or information on the background story of Grandia II?

Saito: There was a god named Granas, the God of Light, and there was a God of Darkness, Valmar. About 10,000 years ago during the Battle of Good and Evil, Granas defeated Valmar in an extraordinary, yet taxing, battle. As a result of the gods' battle, a giant scar was left on the planet. The scar further scattered the planet's inhabitants, spreading them all over the world. That is the basic background story of Grandia II.

Saito: Due to the battle, Valmar was supposed to be killed, but the people of the land started to sense the revival of Valmar, and Granas was supposed to be alive to combat the evil. So people started to sense that Granas might be asleep - due to his tiring battle with Valmar. The people saw a lot of strange occurrences in the world to give them the impression that things were going terribly wrong. This is where Grandia II begins.

Saito: The main character's name is Ryudo. There are two heroines: Elena and Millenia. Elena is a songstress for the Church of Granas, and Ryudo's job is to act as a bodyguard for Elena on her journey to the Sealing ceremony. During the ceremony, things went terribly wrong and Ryudo jumps in to save Elena. The story picks up from here.

Q: Can you tell us how long the game has been in development?

Miyaji: Two and a half years.

Q: What was your biggest challenge during the development of the game?

Miyaji: One of the technical challenges I had to face was our attempt to combine real-time action with an MPEG movie, so that they would run at the same time. So, it's kind of hard to combine the prerendered movie and the real-time CG because the camera position can shift and be very hard to match up. Another challenge we faced was our combination of real-time and prerendered movies; there were difficulties in color matching between the two layers of movement. From a technical point of view, these were our biggest challenges. Once we overcame these challenges, it became one of the most wonderful points of the game. I'm very happy with the result.

Saito: I treat every challenge like it's the biggest. But if I had to pick two, the first was the challenge of keeping people motivated during the entire project. Even if one or two members of a 200-person team are not as highly motivated as the others, it will show in the final product. That was definitely a big challenge to keep people motivated and excited during the production schedule. Another major challenge was that we all tried to put as much love and emotion into the characters. By the end, among the team we all had our favorite characters. Certain people loved Elena more than any of the other characters, and others loved Millenia. Due to this, conflict arose when people were writing dialogue for the characters. We would get upset when others tried to tread on the characters we loved so much, so it became a constant struggle for us as we all looked out for our favorite characters. Who wants their favorite character to look bad? "No you can't put that into Elena's dialogue, it will make her look bad!" While this was a fun challenge for us, it was a challenge nonetheless.

Q: Can you give us a few examples of the new features of Grandia II compared to Grandia I?

Miyaji: The story is more adult this time, more mature. I wanted to make a more cinematic game that the player can cry over...or laugh over. I wanted to make the story reflect this. We also paid a lot of attention to make the graphics as dynamic as possible. And also, we wanted to make the characters and the world setting more lively and real in Grandia II. One of the ways we did this was to use dynamic lighting. One of the examples from the game is when Ryudo and Elena are sitting around a bonfire; it lights up their faces and the objects around the fire.