Japanese legends talk next-gen
Okamoto, Mizuguchi and Sakaguchi drop a few more hints regarding their forthcoming Xbox 2 titles.
Following recent announcements that gaming legends Yoshiki Okamoto, Tetsuya Mizuguchi and Hironobu Sakaguchi are developing games for Microsoft's next-gen console, they've gone and revealed a few more details of what we can look forward to.
Speaking to Famitsu magazine, in an article partially translated by GameSpot, Okamoto-san said that he is developing a party game with online play options, marking a departure from the genres he is most associated with after his work on the Resident Evil and Street Fighter series.
Okamoto-san said he is currently working on two Xbox 2 titles in total, and described one them as an extremely large-scale project which makes full use of the new hardware's capabilities and requires serious investment from Microsoft.
Also talking to Famitsu, Mizuguchi-san - creator of Rez and more recent handheld offerings Lumines on PSP and Meteos for Nintendo DS - said that his Xbox 2 project was an action game.
He added that gamers might be surprised by what he's come up with, in the same way that they weren't expecting a game like Space Channel 5 to follow Sega Rally Championship.
Mizuguchi-san said he sees the next-gen Xbox's high-res graphics and HDTV support as major selling points, and that it was information on the hardware specs which inspired him to commit to the console.
He also praised the system's sound specs and the solid infrastructure of Xbox Live, but did not reveal whether his new title would feature an online mode.
Speaking to Dorimaga magazine, Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi said that he was placing the main focus on storytelling for his Xbox 2 RPG titles. He added that many of today's games fail to offer enough interactivity, so that the experience of playing them is too much like watching a film.
However, we suspect something may have been lost in translation here, since Sakaguchi has previously stated that one of his new games "will let you enjoy a sensation like walking through a spectacular movie, which is what I've always been aiming for." Or maybe he's just changed his mind.