Japanese Nintendo site Nintendo Dream has published a recent interview with Yoshi and the Mysterious Book senior producer Etsunobu Ebisu, director Masahiro Yamamoto, and producer Hisashi Nogami. One of the main topics…
Japanese Nintendo site Nintendo Dream has published a recent interview with Yoshi and the Mysterious Book senior producer Etsunobu Ebisu, director Masahiro Yamamoto, and producer Hisashi Nogami. One of the main topics was the lack of difficulty in the charming 2D platformer which the team says was put in place so players feel like they can take more risks in the game without worrying about a game over screen etc. Here’s what was said:
Even though there is no game over where you take damage, there are still places in the game with solid action. How was the difficulty of the game decided?
Yamamoto: We didn’t plan to be that conscious of difficulty. The things we thought about were preserving the players’ sense of agency and interest investigating the creatures.
Nogami: During development there was a period where Yoshi would take damage.
Yamamoto: Yeah, that’s right. Our staff and Nintendo staff are the kinds of people who are proactive by nature. When they were play-testing, they would push ahead with their investigations, not worrying about taking damage and before they knew it they would be defeated (laughs).
(Laughs)
Yamamoto: We thought it was important for players to try all kinds of challenges, but if you get defeated, and your remaining Yoshis goes down, or you get a game over, you wouldn’t feel able to do dangerous things. Therefore we removed those elements.
Nogami: The most important thing was how you would interact with the creatures and the fun of conducting investigations into them, so we didn’t feel there was any real meaning in you feeling like you made a mistake by having you take damage.
Yamamoto: Allowing you to come back after taking damage or falling into a hole wasn’t because we wanted to lower the difficulty. It was because we thought we wanted the players to have a sense of agency in the investigations. That’s the same reason we didn’t set up goals for each stage too. By not having a goal area, we thought we could better maintain the desire to continue making discoveries.
Exactly, by aiming to reach a goal players may continue forward without trying out lots of things. By the way, there were staff credits in the middle of the game, what was the thinking behind that?
Yamamoto: That was also us wanting to manifest agency. In other games once you clear the ending, I think that gamers have a feeling that now they can do anything, the world is open to them.
(Laughs)
Yamamoto: So we wanted players to get that feeling a little earlier in this game.
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