#kodaka interviews

Astonished to see that @weebynewz got the incredible opportunity to interview Kazutaka Kodaka and Yoichiro Koizumi personally in Japan!!! Our Lil' Dangantuber That Could has come a loooong way. :D

Most of the interview is about The Hundred Line, but I'll start off with the segment focused on Danganronpa just because it doesn't have any game spoilers in it (in fact, there's not nearly as much that's interesting in the DR part. And sadly, there is no "Shuten Order" segment because Weeby hasn't played it yet!)

Danganronpa segment highlights:

Kodaka says "2x2 has turned into a genuinely fun Danganronpa game. In a way, it might get criticized in places because it's so Danganronpa." Uhhh what does that mean bro

Kodaka felt that, based on his extensive experience with Danganronpa, Koizumi was the only natural fit to write the new 2x2 scenario if it wasn't going to be Kodaka himself. Koizumi then comments that "I definitely feel the pressure." lol.

Koizumi says that he was just an outside fan, he'd probably be worrying that Kodaka isn't writing the new 2x2 scenario, but he promises that he's putting his all into making it worthy of the series. Kodaka then threw in that he's heavily supervising everything Koizumi is writing, so please don't worry if Koizumi sounds uncertain; they're going to work together to make it great.

When asked for their favorite trial from the series, Kodaka picks Chapter 5 of Danganronpa 2. He says the he actually hired an outside writer to come up with the tricks and twists of the chapter's murder case, and then... rejected all of them and used his own idea he suddenly came up with. He said he did feel bad about making that person work three months on ideas to ultimately not get used for anything. Koizumi said he also first thought of Chapter 5 of 2, but his second-favorite was Chapter 4 of V3.... and the reveal of the culprit made him sad. (Thanks @themattress for correcting the last detail)

The Hundred Line segment highlights:

In regards to the "Cult of Takumi" route, Kodaka reveals that he started writing it with no outline just two weeks before the deadline of the game's narrative after he realized that the rest of the team was so overwhelmed with work that nobody else was going to have time to create that route. He started out with the intent to make a "damn sexy" route with a typical anime "harem" structure, but it just kind of... naturally steered into this increasingly dark and disturbing storyline as he went that way, making it something subversive of the harem concept instead of sexy. He suspects he was partly driven by how overworked he felt at the time, which brought out his dark side.

Koizumi wrote the Romance routes with the various girls and Takumi as well as the Comedy routes. He says he tried to use the Romance routes as an opportunity to highlight each character's inner depth.

Weeby asked them both for their favorite Hundred Line routes that they DIDN'T write. He specifically calls out Uchikoshi's "Steady Fundamentals" and Koziumi's Romance routes. Koizumi then admits that he still hasn't played or read all the routes! But he says he really liked the Coming-of-Age or "Seishun" Route.

Weeby does ask about the original promotional art for "Extreme x Despair" and "Limit x Despair" and how the game changed between this image (above) and the final game... and he admits that that image wasn't even connected to the original cancelled concept or anything at all. They were under an NDA at the time about the project, so Komatsuzuki just... completely made that image up based on absolutely nothing. LOL. Kodaka says that maybe they could go back to it and make a game based on some it someday... particuarly something with the cute raccoon? Heh.

Kodaka talks some more about hopefully adding DLC to The Hundred Line and making it have 200 lines, 300 lines, even 400 lines. (At which point Koizumi starts laughing and shaking his head and looks sweaty, lol.) Kodaka would love to see this game expand over 10 years if possible, going deeper into the commanders and adding new "transfer students' to the school/squad, etc. He says they are currently preparing to work on the DLC, but production isn't fully underway yet... it's still in the planning stage.

Kodaka says that The Hundred Line will expand into other media formats. They're planning product lines of merchandise that will be available everywhere, including North america. He also says that since they are working with Aniplex on the project, an anime adaption has always been on their minds and been a goal for him. He also cites maybe doing a live-action series via Netflix... and if they do expand into those media, he wants them to offer completely new stories as well, not just be adaptions.

Kodaka compares The Hundred Line to some other works throughout, so it's kind of interesting to see what he's familiar with. He mentions that Detroit: Become Human is a game where the narrative only shifts by degrees whereas he wanted Hundred Line to be radically different on every route that you reach based on your choices. He specifically said that the team sometimes called the game "Hundred Line-Verse" after seeing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, referring to how those different Spider-Man realities were as varied and distinct as he wanted the Hundred Line routes to be. He also compares the experience of the various routes to how it felt viewing the last two Avengers movies, saying he wanted players to come out of the first route (Route 0) of The Hundred Line feeling like viewers did after Avengers: Infinity War.

I will put a cut here because the very last part I found interesting pertains to SPOILERS about the ENDING of first route (Route 0) in The Hundred Line.

I hadn’t seen this one be mentioned on Tumblr before now, so I thought I’d share what I believe I gleaned from this NicoNico article where Kazutaka Kodaka and Jin Fujisawa (who is a co-writer of game scenarios on multiple Dragon Quest titles) talk about the work of writing game scenarios.

Admittedly, I don’t know much about Japanese, so I’m relying on what some machine translations and then trying to to clarify sentences that don’t make sense via other means, etc.

Anyway, with all of that said, here are some of the more interesting points IMO:

Kodaka says that he used to believe - back when he was writing DR1 - that lowering the number of characters in a story will naturally cause the plot to rise to the top of focus/importance/quality. He says that he no longer believes this is inherently true. Not clear if he means gradually lowering the number of characters or just having fewer from the outset...

Kodaka found writing an anime to be much more daunting than writing a game scenario, which is why he argues a collaborator was necessary for him to make Danganronpa 3. He goes on to explain that part of the difficulty for him was that the focus in writing a VN-style game scenario is primarily on what the text invokes even without any visuals, but visuals play a more integral role when making an anime.

There’s some back-and-forth in here about how Kodaka makes games that are more centered around character (or at least the interviewer and Fujisawa argue that he does), and most live-action/anime stories are also centered around attaching viewers to character above all. Yet Kodaka argues that the majority of game writing is normally focused on plot, and that this kind of focus makes it tougher to adapt which makes adaptions to other media more difficult to do successfully, etc.

He admits that he struggles a lot with focusing on writing at length these days, and he tends to waste time surfing around on the Internet when he gets hung up (hey, same). He also notes that although he often feels like the first draft usually turns out boring, it’s the rewriting that he enjoys as he goes through and fixes those boring elements.

Regarding his new venture, Too Kyo Games, he says that everyone takes on numerous roles, flowing freely from one creative role to the next without any need to narrowly define job titles for the employees.