During this year’s BitSummit in Kyoto, Japan, SourceGaming got the chance to speak to Platinum Games’ Atsushi Inaba. In the interview, Inaba touched on various topics, including his thoughts on the Nintendo Switch, the possibility of Bayonetta 3 happening, as well as his memories of working as the producer of Ace Attorney games.
You can find some excerpts from the interview below.
SourceGaming: What feature of the Nintendo Switch interests you the most?
Inaba: The fact that you can use the hardware both inside and outside, that intrinsic feature of the console itself. I think that’s what really propels the popularity of the Switch.
What do you think of the Nintendo Switch as a platform to develop for?
It’s kind of hard to say, as you don’t want to make the game fit the hardware, you want to make the hardware fit the game – you don’t want to add a gimmick to your game just because the hardware supports it – but with the Switch, now we’re in this time where you can play Zelda on the plane, whenever you want, because you can keep it with you or bring it outside, and that’s something we couldn’t have imagined before. So perhaps the thing to do now is to make a game that draws people in and that people want to keep playing, and they can because they don’t have to wait until they’re at home. That’s one thing that would be great to get out of the Switch.
If Bayonetta 3 were to ever happen, would Bayonetta still be the protagonist or would you try to surprise fans?
Maybe there would be a male Bayonetta! (laughs). I would like to make Bayonetta 3. We’re talking within the company even now about what to do. But because we’re constantly talking about it, that actually makes it really hard to say. If we weren’t talking about it, we could just say something random or offhand, you know, but because we’re actually talking about it…Of course, that’s just something that you talk about when you’re making a series – do you want to keep the same protagonist? There’s plenty of precedent for changing protagonists, and so that is something we discuss – do we want to keep the same one, have a different one, add new ones – but that’s certainly not anything I can say for sure at this point.
Bayonetta 1 and Vanquish were recently ported to PC with great critical reception. Are you hoping to bring other titles to the platform in the same way?
The intent is not to take older games and simply re-release them on Steam – the intent is to let as many people as possible play the games, and if it’s possible to put them up on Steam, they can do that. The PC market has been a really big market, so being able to reach that market is something we would really like to do going forward if we can.
What are your thoughts on Bayonetta making it into Super Smash Bros.? How involved were you in that process?
I didn’t have that discussion with Sakurai myself. I think Sakurai most likely puts characters in that he really likes, so he must have really liked Bayonetta. I was really happy to see Bayonetta in Smash. I hope she’s in future Smash games as well.
…do we have time for one more question? You were the original producer for the Ace Attorney (Gyakuten Saiban) series. It was rather unusual idea for a game at the time, do you have any memories of its development that might interest fans?
In the beginning, it was really hard to do – it was released on the Game Boy Advance, which was generally thought of as a children’s gaming device, so there was a lot of doubt about whether people would actually buy this kind of game. When I proposed the idea within the company, people just told me “this is never going to fly, that doesn’t work, that’s a dumb idea.” That made me kind of angry at them a bit, so I went to Nintendo and asked them if they could help me out with the idea. They helped me to build on it. At the beginning, nobody wanted to make it, but after it turned out to be popular, everyone was saying things like “hey, when are you making a second one?”.
t: 
Udon To Publish The Eyes of Bayonetta Art Book
PCGN
[/FONT]
