Innovation and quality via new collaborations Let's begin with asking about how Radiant Historia started up again, but please tell us about your initial impressions when you saw the plan Mr. Takayashiki presented. Hirata: I was shown a ROM of the characters walking in the field along with some documentation, so it was easy to imagine the details of the game from the initial stages. I got a sense for how high quality it was, but if it the development had proceeded on that course, it might have ended up being a game with little more than beautiful graphics. I wanted to be a little greedier than that. I wanted to fine tune it so that more people would be able to enjoy it, so that even fans of the Atlus brand would be satisfied with the sense of fulfillment it offered. That's why I asked Mr. Takayashiki if we could invest some of the Atlus planners' time into the game in order to raise the quality bar for the title as a whole. I thought it would help the proposal reach a higher goal than their original plan. It doesn't seem like there have been many instances in the past where Atlus has collaborated on something like this with outside creators. Hirata: Atlus has drafted plans and sent those out for a portion of development to be done out of house a number of times, but this is probably the first time the opposite has happened. We do get proposals like Radiant Historia brought to us a few times every year, but it's extremely rare for it to be congruent with the direction we're going. To expand on that idea, Radiant Historia was the type of concept that would probably never have arisen from inside Atlus. I thought the significance of a collaborative work on this title would be a good challenge in creating a new kind of RPG. Mr. Takayashiki and Mr. Konishi spoke of various ideas that were suggested by Atlus to touch up the initial plan. Can you tell us about those from your perspective? Hirata: We asked them to incorporate ideas from our perspective of how to heighten the gameplay through the story and battle system. For example, in Mr. Takayashiki's plan, the protagonist was a sword: A supernatural being that traverses across four countries where the experiences in each nation form a grander epic. You would first play one country's history through to the end, and then move on to the next. The concept did pique my interest, but that in itself might not have much going for it as a game. That's where our suggestion to change the sword into a human protagonist who could move through time and carve out history came into play. It's Atlus' style for RPGs to have the amount of time the player invests in the game expand the world, so the changes we suggested made it consistent with the Atlus brand. Also, it's hard to love a protagonist who's a sword. Haha. What about the visual aspects? Hirata: I had almost no suggestions for Mr. Konishi's illustrations. His character design shifted in a more solid direction along the way, but he came to that decision himself in order to make the characters fit into the world. But we did ask them to add in Raynie and Marco. The initial proposal had Stocke paired with two generic soldiers without any distinguishing features in their faces that were scripted to die. But if the allies you gain in the beginning of the game have no personality, and then they die unceremoniously along the way, the player is left wondering why they spent all that time investing in these bland characters, and that's a sad thought. That's why we suggested that they balance things out by putting in Raynie and Marco, a boy and a girl with differing personalities who would survive and become his party members. Thanks to those two, the conversations between them and Stocke became more fun, strengthening the appeal of the game's beginning and making the story even more interesting.