Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax is an upcoming fighting game featuring an all-star cast of light novel characters from various series published by ASCII Media Works’ Dengeki Bunko imprint. A while ago, we saw a few details on the game’s characters, but more recently, key developers working on the game spoke with Dengeki and shared some of their thoughts on character selection.
During the interview, Dengeki asks producer Ryutaro Nonaka and director Takahara Terada how exactly they decide on which characters will be in the game.
“Firstly, it’s got to be ‘the most popular characters’,” answers Terada. “Objectively speaking, the goal is to get protagonists and heroines. However, it may not look that way, as we’ve also selected some of the most popular characters of their respective works.”
“In addition, we’ve also considered using characters who would transition well into fighting games,” continues Terada. “For example, look at the ‘A Certain’ series, where we have a playable character of Misaka instead of Touma [Kamijou, from A Certain Magical Index]. Touma has the ability to negate an opponent’s abilities, which would make him into a character who’d require some sort of habit. For this reason, we’ve made him into a support character.”
“There’s also the problem of ‘if we make a fighting game with nothing but popular characters, they’ll all be the same’,” chimes in Nonaka. “If there are long-ranged characters, then we’d also like to have some short-ranged characters as well, so we gave a lot of thought to the roster adjustment.”
“When I first thought of the roster on my own, I really wanted to have characters from various works, and I decided to with one character per-title, but ended up having one title with two [characters],” shares Terada with a laugh. “While I can’t tell you which title for now, but I’ll just say that I was so indecisive, I bent the rules a little. Also, there was a little drama during the character selection for Durarara!!, as it wasn’t decided until the very last moment to have it be Shizuo.”
“We really wanted to include Durarara!!, but we couldn’t decide which character,” says Nonaka. “Then Terada and I went to meet the staff members of Dengeki Bunko, where we saw a Shizuo figure in the office, and he looked way too cool [laughs].”
“There were many lying around, but that one in particular was really cool and stood out,” says Terada. “It was a figure of him swinging around a traffic sign, and we thought it’d be cool to have something wild like that [laughs]. And during the meeting right after, ‘Shall we make it Shizuo?’ was our proposition.”
Finally, Dengeki asks if we’ll be seeing more support characters than playable ones, as the character selection screen seems to hint at that.
Terada: “I’ll leave that to your imagination. [laughs]”
Nonaka: “At the moment, we have a perfect 1:1 ratio of playable and support characters, but in the end, support characters might have… er, huh, there really is a gap in the character selection screen. [laughs]”
Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax will launch spring 2014 in Japanese arcades.
