Lunar I&II Official Design Material Collection Interviews (Part 2)
Translation by Maou

Youichi Miyaji Interview

[p. 94]

Mr. Youichi Miyaji, Game Arts
Game Arts Representative Director and Company President. Served as Producer and General Project Director for “Lunar II.” Look forward to the next project!

Looking back on “Lunar II,” I think that the way that so many staff members with their unique personalities gathered and worked together was part of what made it a quality game. We were blessed by a fantastic staff from within and outside the company, and this was both wonderful and difficult. In particular, when “giving birth” to a big project, making use of all the unique personalities and combining them together could be difficult. This is a universal problem with almost any project, but in a certain sense “Lunar II” was easy to make, I guess. In a normal situation, Mr. Kubooka would draw the characters and that would be it. In the game-making world there are many people who participate in projects this way, aren’t there? But with us, it ended up being important for everyone, from Mr. Shigema to Mr. Kubooka to Mr. Satou, to get deeply involved in “Lunar II.” All Game Arts projects are like this, really, we get deeply involved in them, delve deeply into the project. Getting this involved is very important, and this is really an issue of communication.

We learned a lot of things this time when we ended up finishing making “Lunar II,” things we’d like to make use of in our next project. In the case of “Lunar II,” the animation parts and the actual game were completely separate, but I’m thinking about taking a step forward from that in our next work and making a fusion of animation and game that’s completely different for the next generation machines. This is what I came up with while working on “Lunar II.” I think it might turn out to be a project that surprises you.

I’m also thinking about things like doing remakes for the “Lunar” series, maybe III, but I think it would be fun to remake I and II in director’s cuts. I read all of the postcards we get from our users that say things like whether the game was fun, or boring, or what shape the next project should take, so I’d like to hear more and more of these requests in the postcards. The reactions of our kind users are fun to read and are the reason for our work, so if everyone could continue to send in more and more reactions, that will give us the energy to make our next project.

It’s taken almost two years to develop “Lunar II” and it’s been hard work. There might not be many games like this on the next generation machines, I think. But we cannot just make the same level of game on the next generation machines, we have to make a game that will surpass it. So this will be hard work, but we will make it.

Anyway, I want to make an overwhelmingly great game on the next generation machines. There are quite a number of things we couldn’t do because of hardware restrictions. Since we will be freed from these restrictions I absolutely want to make another game that delivers a strong impact. I hope everyone will look forward to seeing the level of games we can make and show to you.

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