(laughs) I did really like the private actions in Star Ocean 2, though, and I wanted to expand on those. Takayashiki: I didn’t care that much about the overall story or scenario. That reminds me of something I heard about regarding the development of Valkyrie Profile, that the transmigration system came first, and the rest of the story was built around that. (laughs) Once the rest of the team saw that-”oh, hey, they’re moving!”-we revised the whole gameplay system to match. For awhile we were planning to use a traditional turn-based battle system, but somehow the programmers didn’t get the memo and actually implemented a real-time system. I had made a Game Boy game before, so I knew the limitations of the hardware, and I was really worried about how much we were adding. Could you tell us some more about that? What kind of things, specifically, were being added? The Blue Sphere team, L-R: (top) Tetsu Takayashiki, Takashi Asanuma, Hideaki Ishihashi (bottom) Teruki Ookushi, Naohisa Kamei, and Natsuki Nishimura. This time it was the opposite, where the project just kept getting bigger and bigger. Takayashiki: Normally we start out with a mass of ideas at the beginning, then most of the work is carving out the details. So you switched gears to something super ambitious. We felt like if we stripped all the interesting stuff out just for the sake of being simple, it would simply be a boring game. We want every game in the Star Ocean series to be fun, not just the main numbered installments.
So at first we wrote up some plans for a very simple game, but midway through we became unsatisfied with it. Takayashiki: Everyone was telling us they wanted us to make something small and simple.
What was your development concept for Blue Sphere, then? I mean, the thing that really animated the team, what was most important to you. From the beginning, our plans were to make a compact game. The question then became how to fill in the gap while we waited for that project to begin. Takayashiki: After Star Ocean and Star Ocean 2nd Story, it was decided that we would make Star Ocean 3 for the PS2. Natsuki Nishimura – Programmer -The biggest mystery, and the first thing I’d like to ask about Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, is why the Game Boy? There is a lot of new, more powerful hardware coming out right now.
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