Unconventional Camera Work will Capture the Action in Last Story

Following the revelation that Mistwalker's latest game – Last Story for the Wii – will be hitting Japanese shops in January 2011, the second half of the Iwata Asks column dedicated to the RPG has now been published on Nintendo's Japanese site. The game's director and Misterwalker CEO Hironobu Sakaguchi, and the concept artist and character designer Kimihiko Fujisaka deliver further answers to questions surrounding the first game that Sakaguchi has directed in 18 years.

In the early stages of the game's development, the styles of Western and Japanese RPGs were debated between Sakaguchi, Fujisaka and an unnamed programmer, and these conversations would eventually go on to form the basis of Last Story's plot. A period of 18 months was spent producing prototype work and the result was a lot of unsuitable gameplay systems being thrown out of the proverbial window. Sakaguchi even goes as far as saying enough gameplay systems were conceived that Mistwalker could have made two games.

With all the talk of focus being on the gameplay, it's interesting to learn that the game's camera view will not always be locked on the climactic scenes, with Sakaguchi explaining that:

I feel that doing it this way helps connect to the rich feel of the world. If it's a climactic scene, rather than forcing the viewpoint, we're making it so that the world that the player is seeing is everything. For example, if you imagine that something is taking place in an area where you're not looking, don't you get a little excited?

It's clear that the studio doesn't want players to miss out on too much of the narrative because the choice of fast-forwarding through cut sequences as opposed to skipping them entirely has been implemented, allowing gamers to read the subtitles at their own choice of pace.

To read AndriaSang's translation of the article, head over to the website where you can also read the first half of the Iwata Asks session.