The creators of Mario Sunshine battle it out in an interview with NOM. Highlights inside. The recent edition of Nintendo Online Magazine on Nintendo Japan's website features an interview with the staff of Super Mario Sunshine: Director Koizumi, Director Usui, and Producer Tezuka. Highlights of the interviews are translated below:
Nintendo Online Magazine (NOM): Did Mr. Miyamoto come up with the Super Mario Sunshine title?
Usui: No, Koizumi came up with the name.
Koizumi: I thought Miyamoto would disagree with it, but he seemed to have liked it very much.
NOM: Besdies the normal nozzle, by using the hover nozzle you can fly for a brief moment. We think this changes the nature of the action by quite a lot.
Usui: We had about ten kinds of nozzles, and the hover nozzle was one of the last options.
Tezuka: However, if you have so many kinds of parts, the player becomes confused. As a result, we made the newest concept of hovering the main part of the game.
Usui: But from the view of people that make action games, having a super function like hovering is kind of like cheating. There are actually courses where we tried very hard to make the routes complicated, but with the hover function, you can use a shortcut. As developers, the decision to allow this or not was very difficult.
Tezuka: However, it was more important that when the players play the game, they feel good. As a result, this time we priotized that first.
Koizumi: Basically Miyamoto wanted the game to be broad. This time there are more than one route to the destination.
NOM: By increasing the number of routes, the game feels very vast.
Usui: The area alone is about 4 times Mario 64.
NOM: Were there any stages that did not make it to the final game?
Usui: The nozzles that did not make it to the game seem to be more interesting to talk about. In the beginning, we had a lot of difficulty with the design of the pump. One idea was putting Yoshi on the head and spitting water from the cap. Another idea was having Mario himself spit out the water. In the very beginning, we thought about using guns, but dropped the idea since we considered that when we are releasing in America, we cannot have connections with guns.
Koizumi: We had many nozzles such as one that can shoot water up like fireworks, and another one that was like a sprinkler. But to insert all of them was impossible. We tried to leave only the things that were fun. However, it was difficult because when things become too fun, they can instead become boring. Till the very end we adjusted things like the amount of water the pump holds, the size of the water droplets, the distance the water shoots until.
NOM: Was the control adjusted a lot?
Usui: Miyamoto is very picky about controls.
Koizumi: Miyamoto practically only checked that. (laugh)
The original interview can be found here.
Topic: Mario Sunshine Staff Interview (Read 3587 times)
