Mizuguchi, Okamoto drop game details at Japanese 360 launch

TOKYO--While Microsoft was airing its MTV special featuring the Xbox 360 in North America, the company was also holding a special preview presentation in Japan. That event, hosted by Microsoft Japan, took place at the Virgin Cinema in Tokyo, the same location that Square Enix used for its Final Fantasy XII announcement last November.

After a brief showing of the MTV special on the cinema's big screen, Yoshiki Okamoto of Game Republic, Tetsuya Mizuguchi of Q Entertainment (pictured, above), and Hironobu Sakaguchi of Mistwalker, appeared onstage to present their projects.

The first to appear on the stage was Yoshiki Okamoto, former director at Capcom and current president of independent game studio Game Republic. This was the first time that Okamoto appeared in front of the press since Microsoft announced that he would be developing games for the Xbox 360. While Okamoto didn't have any screenshots or trailers to show off, he spent his time giving a brief overview of what gamers should expect from him and his games bound for the next-generation Xbox console.

"The Xbox 360 is great hardware. We're making two games. They're going to be in two different genres and they call for two different kinds of hardware specs, but the Xbox 360's hardware is so versatile that it can cover them both," commented Okamoto.

"I can't talk much about my games, but one of them is a party game," stated Okamoto. "It's coming to a pretty playable stage [in development], so I'm hoping that we can make an official announcement on it soon. The other game is an action game. But the action game genre is very broad, and my project will be different from any action game I've worked in the past."

In a previous interview in March, Okamoto disclosed that his party game won't require grandiose hardware specs, but that it calls for a good network infrastructure; exactly what Microsoft's Xbox Live offers. He also stated that his game will be a large-scale project that requires significant funding from Microsoft and lots of processing power.

"We're doing our best in developing these games for the Xbox 360," said Okamoto at the end of his presentation. "I'm not sure what kind of expectations people have, but we're hard at work to go beyond those expectations."

Then, Q Entertainment founder Tetsuya Mizuguchi unveiled his upcoming project: Ninety-Nine Nights. He discussed the game, reinforcing previous comments he had made indicating it would not have its roots in music as many of his previous titles had.

Ninety-Nine Nights is a fantasy action game that, according to Mizuguchi, plays as an action game with strategy elements. Players will control a massive army that is challenged by hordes of enemies. While the explanation made Ninety-Nine Nights sound like something from Koei's Kessen series, the trailer shown during the presentation hinted at something completely different.

Mizuguchi showed a brief but impressive preview of Ninety-Nine Nights. It began with two goblinlike characters in a pastoral outdoor setting, laughing and generally having fun. The screen then faded to black, with a crystal-like stone rotating in the background. The phrase "A Land in harmony, until the order of the world, is shattered by conspiracy, leading to a great dividing war," appeared, and the crystal shattered into pieces.

The scene then switched to a crowd of soldiers, with an armored knight in a red cloak as the main character. The words "Time of peace is over" rolled across the screen.

The camera then zoomed out to a full view of a war zone: a battlefield filled with thousands of soldiers. The knight is seen running into the middle of the battlefield, a pillar of light shoots out from his position, tossing hundreds of the soldiers into the sky.

The view then changes to another scene where an ogrelike creature fights tenaciously with a human solider. The phrase "For every tribe, beliefs will be challenged" then appears onscreen. The trailer ended with the game's logo, and the brief appearance of the words "Choose your side."

Mizuguchi revealed that the trailer was made by professionals from the movie industry, including artists who had worked on The Animatrix and Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Cones. He added that gamers should expect more trailers in the coming months, but did not say whether the trailers would actually have any in-game footage.

Commenting that one of Ninety-Nine Nights' major points is its "massive" armies, Mizuguchi revealed that the Xbox 360 allowed for "at least" 1,000 soldiers to be rendered on the screen at once. He added that his team isn't satisfied with that number; they are currently attempting to display as many as 2,000 soldiers simultaneously--all taking advantage of the 360's high-definition resolution.

But graphics and action won't be the only thing in Ninety-Nine Nights, Mizuguchi said. The game also features what Mizuguchi calls the "Multi-angle scenario," in which the player can assume the role of many different characters and see the gameworld from totally different POVs.

"By playing through the game from each character's perspective, the dramas that are taking place in this world will gradually become clear. We wanted to fuse drama into action game this time." He said the script is "mostly completed."

Q Entertainment is codeveloping Ninety-Nine Nights with Korean game studio Phantagram, a studio best known for its Kingdom Under Fire series. Phantagram's CEO Sang Youn Lee, who made a brief appearance at the presentation, is the director of the project, while Mizuguchi is the game's producer.

"We've got two translators in residence so there's Japanese, Korean, and English being heard all over the place. It feels almost like the United Nations. It's a very exciting atmosphere that we've never experienced before, and we're working hard on the project," commented Mizuguchi.

Added Lee: "We want to make a game that's like a movie, where there's tens of thousands of soldiers. The Xbox 360's capabilities turned out to be a lot bigger than we had originally anticipated."

"I've been working in this industry for about 15 years now; I think the development scene will be getting more and more internationally mixed like this," said Mizuguchi.