Something About Japan: Keiji Inafune, Yosuke Hayashi and Toshihiro Nagoshi talk PS4
Comcept’s Keiji Inafune.
Sony’s unveiling of the PS4 at Wednesday’s PlayStation Meeting 2013 would suggest it is, for now at least. Although Sony Computer Entertainment has become one of Japan’s most iconic game companies, its next console has an American passport. Apparently designed in the US, with American lead architect Mark Cerny taking the stage at a New York press conference at an awkward time for the Japanese (8am Thursday), PS4 is rich in exciting new features – and clearly many of these were born in the States.
Ken Kutaragi’s mad policy of creating exasperating bespoke processors is out the window, with a more dev-friendly “supercharged PC” chipset in its place. While Japanese media companies avoid streaming their content at all costs, for fear of damaging their highly controlled retail income, California-based Gaikai will power PS4’s exciting content delivery. And of the games shown at this week’s event, only two and a half were from Japan (Capcom’s Deep Down, Square’s vaguely promised Final Fantasy title and Cerny’s Knack, developed in collaboration with Sony’s Japan Studio).
Not that Japanese developers think unveiling PS4 in New York as opposed to Tokyo was necessarily a bad thing. Nintendo first announced the price of Wii U in the US, and released the console there several weeks before Japan.
“I think Sony were absolutely right to do it in the States,” Comcept’s Keiji Inafune tells me a few hours after PlayStation Meeting. Inafune famously declared the Japanese game industry “finished” in 2009, and among his many projects he is developing Ninja Gaiden Z: Yaiba in collaboration with California-based Spark Unlimited.
“There’s no rule to say that a Japanese console-maker has to announce its new hardware in Japan,” he says. “The most important thing was for Sony to get the maximum amount of global attention for its new hardware, and the place with the biggest market for console games now is America.”
Yosuke Hayashi, head of Team Ninja at Tecmo Koei (which is also collaborating on Yaiba), has a slightly different view on the New York presser. “As a Japanese person, it does feel sad to some extent,” he admits. “But we will continue developing to our best so that PS5 can be announced in Japan.”
Indeed, Japan does seem to be making a special effort to get ahead in the next generation, at least on the tech side. In Japan, software engines are often made concurrently with a game and are rarely as flexible or adaptable (or sellable) as Western tools such as Unreal Engine or CryEngine. Although Square Enix had nothing new to reveal of its Luminous Studio engine during its presentation at PlayStation Meeting, showing the same demo video we’d already seen at last year’s E3, it does reconfirm the RPG giant’s intentions to devise tools that make jaw-dropping visuals cheaper to achieve. Capcom’s Panta Rhei engine looked pretty spectacular too, while we’re already expecting big things from Kojima Productions’ Fox Engine.
Toshihiro Nagoshi of Sega’s Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, the team behind Yakuza and Binary Domain, tells me that of course the promise of enhanced graphics performance is enticing – this man surely dreams in dramatic cut-scenes – but he says he is more intrigued by PS4’s social capabilities.
“I personally am interested in utilising the new technical performance of the hardware to support building user communities,” he says.
Nagoshi told me two years ago that his top hope for the next generation was for new input methods, something which he says now has been appeased somewhat by the touchpad and Move integration in the PS4 controller. “I’m not fully convinced yet, but I have a very good feeling about it. Also, our team seem to be very positive about it, and motivated to get stuck in.”
Comcept’s Inafune, ever the glass-half-full kinda guy, goes one further: “I always get excited about the announcement of new hardware, because it requires innovative new content, which is the best opportunity for me as a creator. It’s a chance for a new challenge.”
Hayashi confirms that Team Ninja is already in gear for PS4: “We have started to work on turning our content into a new form that is wanted by our fans in this current age. I feel like we have reached the end of an era for hardware specs and are now entering an age of service enrichment. Obviously specs will continue to evolve, but how to turn such specs into the services required by consumers seems to be the key importance for developers now.”
And Japan is not short of developers ready to climb aboard. Of 149 developers worldwide that have signed on for PS4, according to a list released by Sony, 45 are in Japan. These include the ones you’d expect (Sega, Konami, Platinum Games, Namco Bandai, Grasshopper Manufacture and so on) but also some that were not a given – for example, Level-5 suffered poor sales of Ni No Kuni in Japan, but happily the mostly-Nintendo developer is back in the ring for PS4.
Few of these have commented on PS4 in Japan’s game media – many of the developers I reached out to for this article said they couldn’t say anything yet. But 4Gamer carried two interviews with Sony Computer Entertainment Japan president Hiroshi Kawano, in which he revealed that PS4 will use Blu-ray discs, that Gaikai may be technically capable of streaming PS4 games to a PS3 (though he said strategically Sony may not go down that route), that Sony is considering something similar to PSP/Vita’s UMD Passport system to allow PS4 owners access via Gaikai to games they’ve previously bought on PS3, that 3D support is under consideration, and that the PS4 console design will probably be unveiled at E3 in June.
“I haven’t seen the final design for the console myself yet,” Kawano told 4Gamer. “I hadn’t even seen the final controller until about yesterday, and we revealed that today!”
It’s another clue that the power balance at Sony may have changed. Despite bearing the emblem of one of Japan’s most famous electronics makers, PS4 will likely be an American console. It’s a Chrysler with a Suzuki badge on the hood.
Post-3/11 Japan has a newfound national pride, and Team Ninja’s Hayashi is surely not alone among Japanese developers who feel a tinge of disappointment to see PlayStation announced in the US. But he and his cohorts can take comfort in the likelihood that Japanese gamers will probably get their first hands-on at Tokyo Game Show in September – whose tagline was announced soon after PlayStation Meeting: “Games keep on advancing”.
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