One of the games that got me interested in this whole “Anatomy of a Game” thing was the NES Ninja Gaiden, which I’ve always felt has a fantastic sense of flow once you get it’s patterns down — even more so than Castlevania, in fact. So I was pretty happy when I interviewed one of Ninja Gaiden’s designers this week and he said that was precisely his intention. I’ll probably never have the opportunity to make a video game, but at least I’m getting better at dissecting them.
You should mainly read the interview for the Klonoa info and concept art, though.
It’s awesome you’re getting to interview these guys! I’m loving reading these over on 1UP, and you’re doing an excellent job of asking about things that are interesting beyond the normal, cursory questions about things.
You may be the best interviewer of Japanese auteurs, Jeremy. I very much appreciate that you told Mr. Klonoa that he dropped the mic.
I love how Jeremy gets noticeably more and ore excited once he learns more about Yoshizawa-san’s connection to Ninja Gaiden. It seems like he had to hold back a bit from turning the interview into an NES retrospective. I was, however, very interested by the Ninja Gaiden content and wouldn’t have read the interview without Jeremy’s forewarning. It would have been neat to get some questions in there about how Yoshizawa-san was influenced by the Castlevania series.
Great interview. I actually played Klonoa 2 first, then the GBA games. I never went back to try the first one. But I think the time has come… I love that someone is trying to talk to these milestone developers from Japan that worked on the not-quite-mainstream games. Keep up the great work!