Tokyo Chronos executive producer Kento Kishigami and director Haruki Kashiwakura from MyDearest recently held an AMA on Reddit, where they talked via Tokyo Otaku Mode translators about inspirations, VR headset support and language options, and more.
Check out the highlights below:
On the length of the story, and language support:
- We can’t give you an exact figure on the time yet, but it is over ten hours so far!
- Tokyo Chronos will be available in Japanese, English, and Chinese. Depending on how well the game does, we would like to localize it into more languages.
On inspirations for the game:
Haruki Kashiwakura, director: “I focused on the game design rather than the story.
I was inspired by lots of things, but especially Mario. When you play Mario, you jump hundreds of thousands of times, but each time it still feels satisfying. In Chronos, you read a lot, and I wanted to make reading it have the same satisfying feeling that jumping in Mario games has.
When I was in middle school, I was addicted to Virtua Fighter. When you put money into the game, it would make really fun noises. I wanted something that felt satisfying from the moment you touched it. I wanted to make a game that the player wouldn’t get tired of while they were playing.
I learned a lot about UI like that from games like Mario, Zelda, and Virtua Fighter. I was originally an animator, so I used the animation techniques like timing throughout the game, such as when menus pop up, to have a similar satisfying feeling.
When I animate, I think about getting rid everything that doesn’t look like art. I did the same for Tokyo Chronos. I didn’t want anything that looked bad or sluggish. I learned a lot from anime and my time as an animator and I used a lot of that education when making this game.”
Kento Kishigami, executive producer: “Since it’s a mystery story, if I tell you the actual titles or authors that I was inspired by when we were working on the story, it would end up becoming spoilers! However, I do like Agatha Christie a lot.”
On Sony’s recent censorship controversy:
MyDearest: “To be honest, this is a very difficult question to answer. As developers, we want to be able to release our games the way we designed for them to be.
We’re very lucky to have Tokyo Otaku Mode as one of our affiliates because they can help us with any problems that come up that must be answered in English, but we are aware that many Japanese companies don’t have similar connections. It’s a sticky situation.”
On modding the game:
MyDearest: “Sorry, but we would prefer it if Tokyo Chronos isn’t modded. There are a lot of official channels that we had to go through to get the game made and community-made mods may cause some trouble with that as we can’t regulate them. Also, we want to be able to officially translate the game into other languages, and the existence of a translated mod may make it so we won’t be able to do that.”
Finally, MyDearest also confirmed that the game will support the upcoming Oculus Quest headset, but are unsure if they will be able to include it for Kickstarter backers as a specific release date hasn’t been announced. The game is also not going to have enhanced graphics on PS4 Pro.
Tokyo Chronos launches in February 2019 for PlayStation VR, Oculus, and HTC Vive.
