Legend of Legaia – 1998 Developer Interview

Hidenori Shibao - Planner
Natsumi Arisawa - Character Designer
Noriyuki Watanabe - Programmer
Michiru Oshima - Composer

—What was your vision for the world of Legaia?

Shibao: My guiding principle with the RPGs I've created has always been the idea of a world on the brink of destruction, but something intervenes and saves it at the end. So my first concern is figuring out what this "ultimate threat" is and how to express it. For Legaia, the mist played that role. I thought it would be cool for the party to go around the world removing the threat of this mist like a kid with an eraser, resulting finally in a world that's clean again.

Early on we did market research with players for Legaia, and some of the more severe comments criticized the plot for being too cliché. (laughs) "Oh let me guess, Noa's going to meet her long-lost parents and brother…" But there is a archetypal literary form that we know as kishu ryuritan ("noble wandering narrative"), in which a hero with a magnificent noble lineage descends into the depths of society and embarks on a grand journey… the Greek myth of Odysseus is such a tale. So I think these stories require certain elements. Actually, I think there are a lot of very unorthodox things to enjoy in Legaia's story too. It turned out to be a game with a lot of freedom for the player.

—Some sections have a lot of freedom, like Chapter 2, where the game opens up and you can go all over the place.

Shibao: This isn't a "go here, do this" kind of game, it's a journey of exploration. The script ended up weighing in at a massive 2,500 pages though. And it went through numerous revisions. On a normal playthrough you'll probably only encounter 60-70% of the dialogue we prepared. There's a lot of situations where if you go to this village over here, for example, then you'll miss out on dialogue you would have heard in another place. There are hidden messages too. So for those who just played it in a straightforward way, I encourage them to give it a replay and try and explore everything and go everywhere. You'll surely discover some interesting stuff.

—What was your image for the three main protagonists?

Shibao: For Vahn, the first thing I thought about him was that he's trapped indoors because of the mist. Surrounded by those thick walls. That's why he's looking forward so much to his first hunting day and going outside. I think it's that timing and his heightened emotions that awoke the Genesis Tree then.

For Noa, first and foremost I wanted an active character. RPGs often use a silent protagonist who you experience from a first-person perspective; this helps with telling the story, and I believe it is also the ultimate expression of a "present tense." Traditionally stories are told in the past tense, you know. Given those narrative possibilities, I wanted a character who would be able to move the story forward. I made her speak purely in hiragana to emphasize her innocence and purity, which also made checking the kanji a lot easier during the debugging phase. (laughs)

—Noa always gives the correct hiragana reading for any kanji spoken by the other characters, too. (laughs)

Shibao: That was intentional, a little gag on our part. Later in the game there is a character that speaks in kanji only. We thought it would be funny to have a character like that since Noa only speaks hiragana. As the quest progresses, Noa becomes more adult. Her words may still be clumsy, but her heart and mind have grown. In contrast, Gala is a character who becomes more and more childlike. At first he's something of an old fogey, always taking the prudent course. But all three characters, as the story progresses, become more pure. They each have different starting points but they become more and more pure—what are they really chasing after…? The twists and turns in the story explore those ideas.

When writing a game story, the big thing to me is that I want the game to be memorable for the player one to two years after they've finished it. That can include simple memories of how they struggled at certain parts, or how hard a certain boss was, but I also hope their impression of the game will cross-over into their real life: "you know, this is probably what Noa would have done here." In other words, I want players to feel like they were really there in this world, so that it becomes a seamless part of their real memories. I think sci-fi fans will understand what I mean… when you read a great space adventure, and you go outside one day and look up at the stars and you randomly think, "Ah, I bet they're fighting up there right now." That's the kind of feeling I want players to walk away with, and what informs my writing.

—And in Legaia's case, seeing fog or mist in real life might trigger those kind of thoughts...

Shibao: Yeah, that's what I'm hoping. (laughs) After playing Legaia you'll never see the fog the same way again. (laughs) The story in Legaia isn't particularly complex, but I definitely want players to roam all over and explore the world. To encourage that we've prepared a number of incentives, including lots of rewards that only explorative players will find. Legaia is a massive game but we treated it like a short story collection. That fundamental question of "why are we on this journey?" was something I always kept in mind—I wanted to show the most interesting, defining moments of these characters' lives.

I don't know what Vahn, Noa, and Gala will do with their lives in the future, but I know when they're 60 they'll be reminiscing on these experiences with the mist. The game is a fragment of the best time of their lives. The development was a struggle because I wanted to make sure it showed that—it's why I wrote 2500 some-odd pages. It's an epic game, but what remains in your heart afterwards are these small moments, like what you would read in a short story. And who doesn't love a good short story?

—The story exists for the sake of these spotlight scenes, in other words.

Shibao: Looking at the overall structure of Legaia, it really is a collection of small, poignant scenes. That's why we make RPGs in the present tense, I think. Another game that does this, I think, is Dragon Quest V, with Papas' memories of his child being born and scenes like that. DQV is a very long game but it's those small scenes that stick with you. Those scenes create the structure of the child's life and character, all while revolving around a single theme. Similarly, Legaia has the singular theme of "repairing" things, in a variety of senses.

Battle and Animation

—Why did you give the battles in Legaia a fighting-game feel?

Watanabe: When you pull off a special move in a fighting game, there's this refreshing feeling of "yeah! I did it!", and I wanted to put that in an RPG. When a good player is playing a fighting game, it looks so stylish and cool. But I think a lot of people see that and think, "there's no way I could ever do that." So I wanted to make it easier for players, to make those moves be something that any player could pull off. That's why, from the beginning, we were determined to keep the inputs simple and not have actual fighting game input timings that require a lot of manual dexterity.

Arisawa: When I saw the battles in the prototype I thought, "whoa, this is incredible!" (laughs) The system was new. The cool part wasn't the fancy graphics, but rather how fun it was to input the commands and see your character execute them. I think having elements like that in a battle system—something that involves you emotionally—is more conducive to replayability.

Watanabe: The Tactical Arts System was already complete in the prototype. It changed very little throughout the rest of the development. We added some additional systems and performance upgrades to improve it. The one thing we had to cut, however, were these special long range attacks we had planned. We felt that they overlapped too much with the Seru summons, so we cut them all. It's a shame because they were essentially complete too. In the opening movie when Gala strikes the ground and it bursts up, that was actually one of those attacks. (laughs)

—Did you always have a clear idea of how to present the Tactical Arts System to players?

Arisawa: Yeah. At one point, when there was a brief lull in the development, I did look at the game overall and wonder if it was enough. I had become so used to it by then, but I wondered if we shouldn't add something else. I mean, I knew it was OK to make the Tactical Arts System the selling point, but I wondered if that alone was enough. As I pondered all that, an event programmer showed me a new camera system he'd created that allowed for multiple dramatic camera angles during the character scenes. He showed us the Rim Elm funeral scene using this system, and the first time we saw it, everyone laughed and said it was too much.

But seeing that camerawork had a positive effect on everyone: it made us all more aware of the camera possibilities. The map creators started creating backgrounds without worrying about the camera angles, and the chibi character designers realized their characters could now be filmed from the rear, so they had to make the animation better to support that.

—I seem to recall there being special animations that only appear in a single scene, too.

Arisawa: There were a lot of those, yeah. Like where a character is running and falls down. We would talk about re-using them for different scenes, but ultimately it made the characters feel more life-like having one-off animations like that.

Watanabe: Part of it was the animation designers trying to compete with the battle teams. People got carried away sometimes though. Some of the animations that were rejected would mysteriously show up in character scenes if you pressed the triangle button…! They had re-added them. I remember seeing them and thinking, "I thought we removed this…?!" Ultimately we left them in as easter eggs, but the amount started to get out of hand. And then the designers would forget they'd added them too.

Arisawa: Yeah, I remember that. There's some in the battle scenes too, the hidden victory poses.

—What were you thinking with the character designs?

Arisawa: I wanted the characters in the battle scenes to move like anime characters. So with their height, their hairstyles, and so forth we went for an anime-ish design.

Watanabe: Nowadays realistic motion capture has emerged as another possibility for graphics. Legaia isn't a purely realistic game though—there's special moves and lots of other things you'd never encounter in the real world. It's a game world and we wanted the animation to reflect that.

Arisawa: When a character punches, the way they twist their hips and have their back spin around up front, that's very anime, and it made the game look more cool.

—Where did the know-how come from for that?

Arisawa: There's probably a lot of anime and movie fans on our staff. That said, no one ever directly copied any specific motions from those mediums.

Watanabe: Our staff are all otakus. Even if they don't say anything it's obvious from the results that they live and breathe that stuff. (laughs)

Music

—Was Legend of Legaia your first time composing for a video game?

Oshima: Yes, it was. Being my first, I had no idea about what went into making a finished video game OST, so I was constantly calling the staff together so I could ask questions... I was basically a big pain in the butt to them.

When you write an OST for a game you end up having unused leftover songs, so after Legaia was over, I tried using them on other projects. But, strangely, those songs I wrote for Legaia, even the rejected ones, didn't fit anything else. Game music is written for specific visual imagery and it just doesn't work when it's inserted into some other game or format. So despite all the work I did on Legaia, I didn't really end up with a surplus of usable material for future projects.

—What was it like composing video game music for the first time?

Oshima: I think the reason battle music in games can be so rousing and exciting is because these are unrealistic worlds. If you put music like that in a realistic setting it would seem comical—the synergistic effect of the music and action would simply be too much. But in games you can go full-force, straight ahead. I suspect that is what composers find appealing about writing for anime and video games. You can do things in them that can't be done anywhere else.

—How many songs did you write for Legaia?

Oshima: About 70 in total. The director took a very detailed, close-up approach to my music, with very practical suggestions and advice. He was able to keep a catalogue in his mind of all the songs I wrote, even when I would forget them. So when the production team had a very specific image for a song, if I was struggling he could offer me very helpful advice. (laughs) But the most challenging thing for me was the battle music. That music has to capture and portray the emotions of the players, and it has to be rousing and inspiring, and it can't be too melodious, and it has to have punch to it… yeah, it gave me the most trouble. No matter how much I reworked it I couldn't seem to make it feel punchy and impactful enough.

—What are your favorite songs from Legaia?

Oshima: The Opening Theme, I'd say. It has the most of me in it. I think music with a certain "ethnic tone" is kind of my signature. All the songs were fun to write though. I was writing them for a full year. Writing, revising, revising again… it took a long time.

—Did you use the game script as a reference while you wrote?

Oshima: The first thing I did was read through the whole plot, and while some of the details gradually morphed over time, ultimately my compositions ended up matching that initial image I had from reading the plot. To be honest, personally, I hardly play games. The reason why, and this is a common pattern among composers, is that they're too addicting. (laughs) If I get sucked into a game it's guaranteed I won't be getting any work done.

—Were there any songs you created without reference to the script?

Oshima: Yeah, there were. However, I think the most important, basic thing when composing is to look at the visuals. No matter what medium I'm writing for, even after reading the script there will be a lot of places where you're stuck or not sure what to do. So for a movie, for instance, I'll often compose without reading the script. I like to start writing as soon as I see the visuals—that's the type of composer I am—and in that sense, you could call me a "visual composer."

A Message from Producer Takahiro Kaneko

"I want to try making a fully 3D RPG." That was the kernel from which the Legend of Legaia project sprung. We started prototyping in the summer of 1995, and by the following spring we had a working prototype running on the PS. At that point, the basic systems, including the fighting game battle system, were mostly complete. Everyone thought, "this is amazing!" and the project officially launched.

Previous RPGs predominantly featured fantasy worlds of swords, sorcery, and dragons. We deliberately chose to focus on martial arts rather than swords, and instead of magic, we thought it would be interesting if something living became one with your body and fought alongside you. This concept evolved into the idea of equipping mysterious creatures called the Seru.

The title "Legend of Legaia" comes from "Gaia," representing the game's core image of a motherly world. We shortened "Legacy of Gaia" to "Legaia," decided that would be the name of this world, and thus the title was finalized. It's neither a planet nor a country, but we want players to think of Legaia as a continent or a shared cultural zone.

I'm quite confident in this battle system, but looking back, there are several elements that could have made it more tactically interesting. If given the chance, I'd like to properly address those aspects in a future game.

Legend of Legaia is the result of people who loved games to an abnormal degree, who became game developers, who struggled and worked hard to secure the production environment they envisioned, and who then poured 200% of themselves into making it. Please enjoy it, and please see it through to the end. The battles will make you gasp, and the story will make you cry.

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