The Story Begins Creator: Katsuya Eguchi
It is 1986. Katsuya Eguchi, a young graduand of the computer graphics course at Japan Electronics College, is faced with the most difficult decision he may ever face in his life: the company to which he will pledge his allegiance. Since, in Japan, a ‘salaryman’ may stay with a company his entire life, this isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. Eguchi, who spends as much time in his local arcade as he does in class, isn’t sure he wants to go the traditional route and pick up the first job that comes along, allowing him to stay in his native Chiba.
“As I was getting ready to graduate I was looking at companies to join, and I wasn’t sure what to do,” Eguchi recalls when we meet him today. “One of my friends knew I loved to play videogames, and said to me: ‘What about Nintendo?’ I replied: ‘What, that company that makes playing cards?’” As strange as it may seem, three years after the release of the Famicom in Japan, Katsuya Eguchi had never heard of Nintendo, the videogame developer, only Nintendo, the hanafuda card manufacturer. “I played videogames since I was a kid – I really liked games a lot!” Eguchi protests. “But I never had a home console and always just went to the arcade to play. As a result I’d never heard of the Famicom or NES. Though as soon as I knew that was what Nintendo did, I thought, hey, I like games, and games are related to computer graphics, so let’s give it a shot and see what I can do!”
This decision, though not taken without care, had a deeper effect on the industry than you might expect. Though Eguchi’s beginnings at Nintendo were humble – the first game he worked on was “A Formula One racing game… but I don’t think that ever got released overseas, so let’s just drop that one,” he laughs – his talent was quickly noticed and his work as level designer is ingrained in what some still consider to be the greatest game ever made: Super Mario Bros 3. But it was specifically his decision to move hundreds of miles from home to Nintendo’s base of Kyoto, leaving family and friends behind, that led to the genesis of one of the most charismatic series of Nintendo’s oeuvre, Animal Crossing.
“Animal Crossing features three themes: family, friendship and community,” says Eguchi of his celebrated work. “But the reason I wanted to investigate them was a result of being so lonely when I arrived in Kyoto! Chiba is east of Tokyo and quite a distance from Kyoto, and when I moved there I left my family and friends behind. In doing so, I realised that being close to them – being able to spend time with them, talk to them, play with them – was such a great, important thing. I wondered for a long time if there would be a way to recreate that feeling, and that was the impetus behind the original Animal Crossing.”
Animal Crossing was first published as a Japan-only N64 title in 2001 as D Butsu No Mori, over 14 years after Eguchi had first explored the idea. Although the game was originally commissioned merely as a way to utilise the realtime clock built into Nintendo’s failed 64DD hardware add-on (before being released on cartridge), the idea of loneliness deeply informs the opening of the game and its sequels.
As Animal Crossing begins, the player is a stranger in a strange land. Delivered alone into a foreign town by train or taxi, with few belongings and a barren shack to live in, you’re initially forced into servitude for the ostensibly benevolent Tom Nook, the only comfort arriving from the letters you receive from your ‘mom’. Delivering gifts and kind words, it’s part of the thematic power of Animal Crossing that, as the player grows more comfortable in the town, making new friends and creating a new home, these letters mean less and less until they’re almost forgotten about completely.
With this kind of pathos embedded in the series, it’s a surprise to discover that Eguchi is remarkably humble about the games’ meaning to players. He has never heard of the Korean comic that circulated late last year detailing a son realising his mother’s love by visiting her Animal Crossing town after her passing, but when we talk about it, he is obviously moved. “To think that I was able to help create something, or that something that I worked on, played such an important role in someone’s life and helped them understand something important to them…” He pauses. “It makes me really happy.”
No matter how shy he is about receiving credit for it, it’s the series’ commitment to connecting people, born of a lonely year in Kyoto, 1986, that means the most to Eguchi, and it’s that which has influenced the progress of the series, from the first game’s message boards and mail system (themselves referenced by Wii’s frontend), through Animal Crossing: Wild World’s wi-fi connectivity, and now to City Folk’s WiiSpeak peripheral. Though the WiiSpeak add-on is not intended to be shipped with Animal Crossing: City Folk when it is released in mid-November (in the US – a European date has yet to be set), the accessory has been designed with Animal Crossing in mind.
“With Animal Crossing we’ve always had at least the ability to consecutively visit the village,” establishes Eguchi. “We could have four people in one village and they could all take turns playing, so you were playing in the same world, if not playing at the same time. With the DS version thanks to the wi-fi connection we were able to have four people playing at the same time. Now with Wii we’ve carried over that wi-fi connectivity.
“But we thought a lot about what we could do to enhance that feeling that you were playing with those other people in the same room, or rather that they were right there with you, close to you. While we were trying to think about ideas to do that, our hardware group said to us, ‘Hey, we just designed this mic peripheral – would that be of any use to you?’ and we said, ‘Wow, that’s going to work really well with Animal Crossing!’ So then we worked together to make sure both the hardware and the software meshed together.”
Since the WiiSpeak device is a mic placed on top of (or below) the TV, it “leads to a different sort of experience,” according to Eguchi, “certainly to what you might have had in the past from, say, traditional headsets. It allows you to have a conversation with the people you’re playing with as if you were in the same room. You can have this very natural back and forth. And because this is a room mic, you’ll be able to have group conversations. So if there is one family on one Wii, and one on the other, you’ll all be able to talk to each other.”
Though such a mic seems certain to falter under such conditions, with TV noise and competing family members making unwelcome contributions, we managed to play Animal Crossing: City Folk on the show floor of July’s E3 event (admittedly a quieter place than E3s past) with an excitable Charles ‘voice of Mario’ Martinet on the other side, and it worked surprisingly well. Thanks to intelligent sound filters, and even with the non-stop babbling of a real-life Mario (and Luigi) pouring forth, the results stood up to scrutiny.
There’s more to City Folk than just greater communication options, however. Forever mindful that community is built not just through communication but by sharing, the options that exist for user creativity have expanded greatly, as has the ability to enjoy events with others.
Players will still be able to create patterns at the Able Sisters store, but now, if you’re creating patterns for, say, a pullover, you’ll be able to design not only the front but also patterns for the back, and each individual sleeve. “You’ll also be able to create hats and other accessories to this level, too,” enthuses Eguchi. “And when you create these items, Mable will ask you what you were thinking, so you can categorise your items for other players.
“You’ll also be able to do more than ever together when you play online. You’ll be able to experience events or see concerts together, for example. And while in the DS version we discarded a lot of events that were popular in the GameCube version, we’re bringing them back. We’re including Halloween, we’re bringing back Jingle, the reindeer that visits during the holiday event, and we’ve got some new events, too. For example, during spring we’ve got a special visitor who brings paint and eggs so you can have an egg hunt, and we also have a carnival that’ll introduces another new character to the Animal Crossing world.”
Describing Animal Crossing: City Folk’s new features, Eguchi’s face lights up and his speech quickens as he becomes more and more excited trying to explain it all. “Of course, we’ve kept in all the things that people have grown to like about Animal Crossing,” he continues, smiling widely. “The furniture series, the items, the wallpaper – and, as you’ve come to expect, we’ve also added a lot more to collect. Not only do you have new furniture series and new wallpaper to collect, thanks to WiiConnect24 new items to buy or make part of your collection will be downloaded to your Wii. The downloadable items are not already on the disc just waiting to be unlocked. They’re downloaded online to your Wii, so we genuinely will be able to add any new items that we wish to the game.”
In describing the new city location, reachable by bus from the player’s village, Eguchi is at perhaps his most joyful. “The city is sort of a shared space for you and all of your Wii friends. In the city, you can have your hair cut at Harriet’s beauty salon, but there are also new features, for example the Auction House. Gracie also has her own store, there is the Happy Room Academy office, and there’s even a theatre, where you’ll be able to catch a comedy show!”
At Harriet’s beauty salon, first seen in Animal Crossing: Wild World, players now have the ability to have a ‘makeover’ that replaces the face of the traditional Animal Crossing protagonist (usually only ever referred to as ‘boy’ or ‘girl’) with that of any Mii on their system. When we ask why Animal Crossing: City Folk doesn’t make Miis more central to the experience, Eguchi is taken aback. “Well, we could have! We just chose not to. I think that a lot of people have a familiarity, or an attachment, to the Animal Crossing main characters, so we thought that rather than limit them to having Miis as a player character, if we gave them a choice to create a Mii mask, it would give the player the chance to identify with the player character as they saw fit. Because we want the player to identify with their character. The option works better within the framework of the game, because players can say, ‘OK, today I’m going to do this and I’m going to be a Mii’, and on other days they can choose not to.”
This possible attachment to Animal Crossing’s main characters has also influenced another decision, to allow players to import their characters from Animal Crossing: Wild World into City Folk. “They’ll bring with them the ability to access all the things that they’ve unlocked in their catalogue, so it makes the move a little easier than it was from GameCube to DS.” Not as easy as you might think, though, Eguchi laughs: “You’ll still have to purchase those items again – and you won’t be able to bring your bells across with you!”
Eguchi does recognise that some players will have developed rather an attachment to their personal Miis too, however. “Players can spend all their time as their Mii,” he explains, but he’s eager to elaborate on the playful possibilities of his team’s design decision. “Something I think would be fun is to wear different Mii masks and mix it up a little bit! If you were going to visit a friend’s village maybe you could wear the mask of someone else they knew and play a prank? Or dress up as a monster Mii – as Bowser! –and give them a scare! That kind of thing will be a lot of fun, and that’s the kind of thing we want to enable.”
And the team has enabled many ways to visit other players villages, too – not just across Wii’s wi-fi capabilities. “If you want to play with your character in a friend’s town but either don’t have wi-fi or would simply like to do it on their Wii, you’ll be able to put your character on your DS, take them to your friend’s home and move them on to their Wii and visit their town that way,” Eguchi explains. “So you’re not necessarily going to have to have wi-fi to experience what Animal Crossing has to offer in terms of connectivity.”
Though connectivity is important, the coherence of the Animal Crossing world is just as important to Eguchi. “We really want to keep the Animal Crossing world its own special place,” he says. Part of the reason Miis don’t replace the protagonists is also, Eguchi tells us, the reason Nintendo has no plans to offer a Wii Animal Crossing Channel. “It’s a big game, a huge game for the system, and to try and cut off a portion of that to place in a channel, I’m not sure if that’s something we’d be interested in.”
In the same respect, other Wii features such as the Weather Channel will have no bearing on the game. “Weather patterns are not very uniform across the world, so if we included that in the game, some people would lose out on the variety of weather on offer,” Eguchi sighs. “Animal Crossing relies heavily on the feeling of the changing seasons and weather – maybe on a rainy day you’ll catch more fish – and because the game relies so heavily on these aspects, we’ve decided to not tie the game’s experience to the Weather Channel to offer everyone the chance to experience all the game has to offer.”
Players will be able to take photos within the game and transfer them to SD card or send them as letters from within the Wii Menu, but due to Animal Crossing’s status as a “special place” it’s unlikely there will be much more integration with wider Wii features than that. Despite Eguchi’s protests that this was a good example of the expansion of communication options “not only in-game, but outside the game, too,” it’s difficult not to feel that at least in some ways Animal Crossing: City Folk is a missed opportunity to realign the Wii hardware’s frontend to include an almost PlayStation Home-like experience.
“It’s definitely a possibility,” Eguchi relents. “We just haven’t chosen to do it this time. It’s certainly something to think about in future, though.”
The changes that have been made to the Animal Crossing formula for Animal Crossing: City Folk are subtle, and to some that will be a disappointment. But each change has been carefully balanced to fit the series themes – family, friendship, and community – without making Animal Crossing any less a special place. And, if you’ve yet to visit, City Folk looks likely to be the most special yet.
Charity Chaos · Wed Sep 02, 2009 @ 01:31am · 0 Comments |