As part of SEGA’s 60th anniversary Ryu ga Gotoku Producer Daisuke Saito was interviewed by SEGA Europe marketing manager Derek Seklecki. During the course of the interview Sato-san shares his thoughts on what game series he would like to work on, removing voice controls if he ever got a chance to make Binary Domain 2, what it was like bringing together actors and writers to work on Binary Domain1, and his time working on FZero GX.
The entire interview is fantastic and really shows his passion for Binary Domain calling it a hidden masterpiece [which we would agree with]. Going in to more detail on the creation of Binary Domain he discussed how they would write the script in Japanese, then send to the western localization team for translation, then translate that script back in to Japanese for a more authentic western style game feeling. All of the cutscenes were then created in Japan with the English actors over a period of a couple of months. He goes on to explain how he was never happy with the voice controls and they were really only added to try and do something different to other FPS/TPS games at the time like COD and Battlefield and if he ever gets the chance to make Binary Domain 2 he’d like to fix the voice commands, then remove them.
When asked about his time developing FZero for Nintendo he recalled that the Producer at Nintendo, Takaya Imamura, didn’t make many changes to SEGA’s designs rather praising them for the work they accomplished.
Sato-sans enthusiasm for taking on Sonic as a project was obvious as it quickly became the first thing that he could think of wanting to tackle working at SEGA. Honestly this sounds like a great idea! give the Sonic IP to someone that actually wants to work with it and has proven over and over again they know what they’re doing!
“It’s an IP that I haven’t come to before. In the sense that I want to try it,… well, Sonic. After all, when you hear SEGA you think Sonic. I’d like to get involved once at least. But for me, the so called Sonic, is well, if I were to do it, I wouldn’t do Sonic as it was. I would like to make a completely different Sonic.”
When asked if his team would like to try and create a new IP he responded with
We really want to make new things, not just Ryu Ga Gotoku… We want to take on that challenge in the future. We want to take it onto a completely different genre, so you can expect great things.
Something new from the Ryu ga Gotoku team would be great even if it’s outside of the Yakuza brand. The team have proven time and again that they can handle it so we’d love to see what they can do!