A portion of a Wired interview with Masahiro Sakurai…
Wired.com: It’s been a long time since the last Kid Icarus game, so it seems like that gives you a lot of creative freedom — people want to see the character come back but have no expectations for what the game will play like.
Sakurai: That’s not necessarily the case. Having said that, there are things that you want to maintain from the original, but also a lot of things that I want to change. With that freedom, I did want to change the genre of the game. In thinking about the game, what is the core of the game, I feel that Kid Icarus is slightly comical.
Kid Icarus: Uprising will feature a combination of sword attacks and target shooting.
At the time, games like Zelda or Metroid coming out on the Disk System were trending towards very serious adventure types of game. Kid Icarus doesn’t take the player entirely seriously. So I wanted to take advantage of that element and make a story and a flow of gameplay based around a character who is very serious about moving forward in the game but is also very carefree.
Wired.com: You started this game before the 3DS had a 3-D stereoscopic display. How did the game change as the hardware evolved? Does it use the accelerometer?
Sakurai: I actually knew about the 3-D display quite early on, but of course I couldn’t reveal that to the staff who were working on the game. They just knew it was based on 3-D graphic technology, not a 3-D display. It would be too risky at that stage, in view of leaks and whatnot. The staff only learned about the 3-D display this year.
In regard to the controls, as you know, the 3DS features a slide pad for analog controls. Typically with DS games, for example first-person shooters, the aiming would be handled by using the stylus on the touch pad, sort of like a mouse. What you end up with there is, you have to move the reticle and you reach the edge of the screen and you have to start over again. So it’s an inconvenient method.
The way around that is using like a flick motion to quickly turn. Or you can do a stronger “smash” attack by flicking on the stick. That makes for a very effective mode of control for this shooting genre. The controls are really boiled down to three separate devices on the 3DS: The slide pad for movement, the L button for shooting and the touch panel for aiming.
Wired.com: What else can you say about the gameplay?
Sakurai: I talked about how the game uses the three devices — the stick, the L button and the touchscreen. The modes of attack are separated between melee attacks like sword slashes and shooting. When enemies are at a short distance, a simple button-press will do melee combat and multiple presses will do combos.
Likewise for shooting. Both of those control schemes in combination with flicking the stick do evasive maneuvers, and stronger attacks based on the timing.
As regards the weapons, there’s basically unlimited ammo. Upon first pressing, there’s a large, charged shot that fires. By holding down the L button you get a large stream of machine-gunlike bullets. With both the big shots and the small shots, the gameplay revolves around how you use those.
I don’t know if you noticed during the trailer, but you might have noticed some of the shots curving to hit enemies. So there’s that sort of flexibility built in to the weapons and the shots. Unlike a first-person shooter where you’re required to aim at a very specific, small target, there is that sort of — I don’t want to say auto-targeting, but a sort of corrective element in that. The emphasis is off of precision targeting. The gameplay is more focused on dodging and maneuverability.
Wired.com: Is it a 3DS launch title?
Sakurai: We don’t know yet.
Wired.com: Having now done a major console game for Nintendo and a major handheld game, where do you as a designer want to go next, home systems or handhelds?
Sakurai: I’ve never made a game for a high-definition platform. That’s definitely something I’m interested in.
Full interview here
