My first E3 appointment, after Nintendo’s press conference, was meeting with XSEED games to talk about their biggest upcoming title for Wii, Little King’s Story. One of the project’s producers, Yoshirou Kimura (who was also notably responsible for a game called Chulip, where the objective was to kiss everybody in town), was on hand to talk about the game as it was being demoed, and I got to ask him a few questions after the demo was complete; scroll down a bit further to see my interview.
For those unfamiliar with the game, you are put into the role of a young king who has just ascended to the throne; you start out with a small town, low on citizens and poor as dirt, and you need to use your newfound abilities to get everyone else to do stuff for you. In a style that may remind some players of Pikmin, you’ll gather people of various careers behind you, to make them do tasks or complete dungeons or things of that nature. The controls are very simple, and consist mostly of recruiting citizens and then firing them, like a cannon, toward tasks they have to complete.
As you expand your kingdom, you’ll be converting your citizens from Carefree Adults to Hardworking Farmers, exploring the countryside and finding hot springs, building buildings and attracting more citizens, etc. The goal is to make your country as large as possible. To do that, you’ll end up completing a series of smaller goals, some of them consisting of reaching a certain amount of money, which is the only kind I got to saw. As you get money, you’ll be able to create buildings, which in turn gets your citizens more jobs, meaning they’re more capable of exploring and enlarging your country. You can see how the progression goes.
Where the game differs a bit from Pikmin, though, is that the individual citizens have personalities and agendas of their own. Each citizen has slightly different traits, such as higher strength and such, which will make certain characters more suitable for certain jobs. Besides that, each citizen has a life that they will live out if you do not recruit them, and you can see them during the day, performing their job, or doing nothing if they’re unemployed. You can even have bonds develop between characters, either those of kinship or of romance.
The game’s charm and humor is what really sold me, and is why it was good to have Mr. Kimura on hand during the demonstration, to get his input on certain elements of the game. He mentioned how he liked to get his personality into the game through many different elements, and mentioned that the game is actually going to be rated T, though certain things may even suggest a borderline M rating. He prefers to make games for said mature audience, he said. Here’s a list of some of the things present in Little King’s Story that made me laugh, or just made me excited for the final product:
- Hot springs are quick and easy ways to replenish your health, and they’re scattered all over the world, even in boss rooms. It’s possible for part of your army to be attacking a vicious monster while the other half watches, chilling in the hot spring. Mr. Kimura said he especially enjoyed that.
- Once your castle gets large enough, you’ll acquire a ping-pong table, and can play a ping-pong mini-game with one of your cabinet members. When I asked why this was in the game, Mr. Kimura responded that he just liked ping-pong a lot.
- If two of your citizens become romantically involved, you can boot them into a church and they’ll get married. Immediately upon getting married, they’ll exit the church with a child of their own. (Mr. Kimura commented that it’s okay to make jokes like that if the characters are smaller and more cartoony.)
- If a character dies in battle, they actually die, but most times a drifter will wash up on shore, with no memory, completely ready to take their place. Sometimes, though, a character dies and stays that way, and you’ll be able to see a funeral service for them around 4 pm the next day; depending on how many people liked them, you could have a very large or very small number of people there mourning.
- While most people will be promoted and given jobs, some citizens may remain Carefree Adults; these people will sometimes be discriminated against by those who have jobs, who will go so far as to kick them as they walk by. These same Carefree Adults can sometimes be seen wandering around town at night, wondering aloud what they are doing with their lives.
Little King’s Story is close to completing right now, and is scheduled for release in North America on July 21. If I can get my Wii working by then, I’ll try my best to get my hands on a copy for review purposes.
As mentioned earlier, I had some time afterward to ask Yoshirou Kimura some questions, with the aid of a translator; I ended up cutting out several of my interview questions, since I ended up cutting into someone else’s time, but I’m quite happy with how things turned out. Here’s a transcript of the interview:
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TSD: First off, why did you want to put this game on the Wii as opposed to a different system?
Kimura: Because this game has so much social irony, I wanted the whole family to enjoy that as well. (laughs) So, when a kid is playing this game, he can understand what his father’s going through at work, with a king or a boss telling him what to do. His dad could be a boss and, you know, having a hard time controlling his subordinates, and they can all get together and say "That’s kind of like my life."
TSD: (laughs) I like that.
Kimura: Well, another thing is to have a communication between the kid and the father.
TSD: I don’t think I’ve heard that before from a game developer.
Kimura: I think a lot of people do say, like, "This is for a family to get together and play togther." This is more like, they could talk about what’s happening in the game as a communication tool.
TSD: Regarding the art style, where did that come from, from an inspirational and a technical point of view?
Kimura: One of the things you’ll see is that, uh, the cutscenes that you saw are kind of like the Russian artists and like the Czech artists and the animation that they have, really I enjoyed watching those, so that was my inspiration.
For the in-game graphics, I really wanted to have like a puppet type of feel, and not everything straight but kind of twisted, or moving, for the background as well. One other thing I really concentrated on was the head. I really talked to the character designer. By looking at the head, you can kind of tell right away what kind of job class they are.
This is an effect that you kind of see in Wii games lately, but it sort of has this sheer cover mask over it, and by doing so, it has this glow effect. So, even this flower, it’s only a yellow flower but you’ll see a little glow coming out of it. Our technical director came up with this technique three weeks before [Tokyo Game Show] and then we started playing with it, and we thought it looked great. It sort of looks like a lemon glowing, so we’re calling it "Cross Lemonade". (laughs) That’s the name of this effect.
TSD: (laughs) It looks very nice.
Kimura: I think that by doing so, it’ll look better than other Wii games that you see.
TSD: My next question, what is your favorite element included in the game?
Kimura: Besides ping-pong?
TSD: (laughs) Besides ping-pong.
Kimura: The characters Howser [one of the king’s advisors] and Poncho.
TSD: Who is Poncho?
Kimura: Well, Howser, he is the knight, and… (he walks over to a cow) that’s his trusty steed Poncho. Kind of like a house dog, but a house cow. He’s always in the castle, kind of like a pet. I can’t reveal too much, but Poncho has a little secret that you can only see on the North American game. So when you finish the game, when you master the game, you’ll find out what that secret is.
TSD: You were also responsible for the game "Chulip", a rather different, unorthodox game. Is that part of your goal as a game designer, really new, unusual experiences?
Kimura: Actually, first of all, in my mind I’m making regular games. (laughs) When I concentrate and try to make a good game, those are the outcomes of what I create. But at the same time, I do understand that if somebody asks me to create, or somebody else to create a game like that, I don’t think anybody, including myself, could make that game.
But at the same time, there are a lot of negative points about that game [Chulip] like level design and little elements that I wanted to perfect, and all those parts that I wanted to fix are in Little King’s Story. (laughs) But that is one of my favorite games. I would love to kiss that game.
TSD: One last question, will this be a standalone game, or will this be launching a new franchise?
Kimura: I do want to make a sequel, but that all depends on how much North American users buy this game. So, please…! (laughs) Like, our other title, No More Heroes, that was published by Marvelous, I really concentrate on what the North American and worldwide users will think about our game, so I’m really interested in how the US audience is going to take this.
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