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AusGamers: Welcome to back to AusGamers, once again at E3. We're here with Motohide Eshiro, so let's get into it. Motohide, taking on Okamiden -- Okami became such a much-loved series after the first game's beautiful art style. Was this something that you embraced for the DS development?

Motohide Eshiro: Yeah. At Capcom with the original Okami, and now Okamiden, I guess we now have two "series" of Okami games if you will. We'll see how it goes from here on out with them, but I'm pleased to be invloved with it. The original is loved by lots of people and they hope to see things in this game that will please them, so I want to make sure that when making this game on the Nintendo DS that it doesn't betray their expectations. At the same time we're hoping to bring in new fans to the series, introduce them to it as well and hopefully it offers them something to let them get into the game and start playing.




AG: I've seen and played the game and it plays fantastically, but just for our audience could we maybe explain some of the difference between the original game and the DS game and maybe some of the advantages of working on the DS, given the type of game that it is.

Eshiro-san: Well the original Okami was on PlayStation 2 followed by Nintendo Wii. The main character in that was Amaterasu and you just played with Amaterasu alone in that game. This time our main character is Chibiterasu, the child of Amaterasu. But Chibiterasu being a child, doesn't have all the powers available to him that his father did, so he'll need some help and to that end we've introduced some partners. These partners have different abilities that you can use to overcome various problems and challenges in the game. So that's one of the big differences between this game and the last one.

Also, with the touch-screen on the Nintendo DS, that's something really great that we have this time. Because now when you're drawing with the celestial brush, you draw on the game exactly what you want to draw. So the touch-screen is definitely a big advantage this time around. Another thing that's kind of different if I may add to that, is the fact that the original was really an action-heavy game. This one has more puzzle-based elements. So you could say it's more akin to the Legend of Zelda games that appeared on the Nintendo DS in that sense.

AG: Now you must be excited about Nintendo 3DS. So much potential there for this type of game -- such a beautiful system. Have you had any chance to look at the development side of that yet, Has Nintendo approached you about it? Are you sad that you couldn't make Okamiden for 3DS?

Eshiro-san: I actually had a chance to see and get some information about the 3DS yesterday and I think it's a great system with a lot of potential for game designers -- there's a lot you can do with it. Especially from a graphics stand-point, there's so much potential there. I'd like to be able to make some games for that in the future, but as far as being approached by Nintendo, I personally haven't been approached by them to make anything for it as of yet. Maybe someone at Capcom has, but personally speaking I haven't at this moment.

For Okamiden itself, I don't think it's unfortunate that we couldn't make it a 3DS game. I'm very happy that it's a Nintendo DS game because of the touch-screen. We wanted to make it really suited to everything you can do with the touch-screen, so we worked really hard to make sure that those aspects of the game are being fully exploited. That was the main challenge for us to overcome and hopefully when we get this into people's hands and they start playing it, they're going to see how great using the touch-screen is. Hopefully they have a really good reaction to Okamiden on the DS and start clamouring for a sequel. Then if they ask for that sequel on the 3DS, well... we'll see what we can do.




AG: Finally, we've seen a lot of Capcom games in Japan in the past expand beyond being just games and work their way into popular culture like Manga, anime and movies. Is that something that you would like to see happen to Okamiden? There's such a rich history there and such a vibrant art-style.

Eshiro-san: I think the art-style of Okamiden is kind of rare. It's an Asian art-style that you don't see much in games and that's something I would like to see translated into something else whether it be Manga comics or animation of some sort. One of the problems I think though, is that the setting of Okamiden, is really specific to the game-world and I wonder myself how well that would translate into another field like animation or comics. I don't think it's impossible, but I think there would be some challenges to overcome and I'd be very interested to see how we could do that. If the opportunity did present itself, I'd be up for the challenge.

AG: Ok, thank you very much; arigato gozaimas.

Eshiro-san: Thank you very much.