While Hironobu Sakaguchi is known for making story driven games, Mistwalker has been trying new genres on iOS. Sakaguchi loves to surf so he made a surfing game called Party Wave. Why did he want to make a tower defense game?
"I am a big fan of tower defense games and I’ve been playing them on my iPhone. I started working on Blade Guardian with Kensuke Tanaka and the programmer, Tomoki Anazawa, whom I worked with at Square. That was three years ago. We haven’t worked on it for a while but the release of Party Wave enabled us to finally finish it," Sakaguchi said to Siliconera. Anazawa worked on the Romancing SaGa series and Legend of Mana. Tanaka helped develop PlayOnline.
What separates Blade Guardian from other tower defense games is you can roll BLADEs into enemies using the gyro sensor. I asked Sakaguchi why he added this gameplay mechanic.
"Being able to not only wait for enemies but also to actively move the tower around – This idea came about from the beginning. We came up with many different ideas of control methods but we eventually decided on the gyro sensor to control spheres," Sakaguchi answered.
Blade Guardian is available now for $0.99 on iTunes.
