Ono on 3DS personal interest, possible ports, power of the platform, new genres and working on something new

A portion of a Guardian interview with Capcom’s Yoshinori Ono…

G: When did you decide you wanted to work on a 3DS title?

YO: Two seconds after seeing it I knew I wanted to do something, I didn’t necessarily know what, I just knew I wanted to do something. The potential was there, I didn’t even have to think about the specifics. I could see it.

G: How do you think developers will exploit the 3DS going forward? Is there much still to learn about the device?

YO: With any game we make, we always feel like we do 100%. In terms of the 3D edition, we think we’ve ticked all the boxes in terms of what the 3DS is capable of. But what tends to happen – and this was the case with the NES, the SNES and so on – is that we reach a point where we think we have accessed 100% of the hardware’s ability, but then you learn and apply new techniques and suddenly 100% is not 100%. We have included all the features of the 3DS, but I have a feeling there exists some sort of synergy where we’ll be able to achieve above this.

G: Is there anything from Capcom’s rich back catalogue that you’d like to see being re-imagined for 3DS? I’d love an Onimusha or Devil May Cry title.

YO: It would be an interesting idea to bring classic games back, but one thing to note is that Street Fighter 4 3D has to be on the 3DS: it couldn’t have existed without the console. If we produced a simple port of Onimusha it would be difficult to fundamentally utilise the capabilities of the 3DS as we did with Street Fighter. I’d rather bring out a completely new title. But, whether that could be a sequel or perhaps themed around Devil May Cry or Onimusha – that’s a different question…

G: Do you think the 3DS will prompt a whole new range of game genres?

YO: If people don’t resort to just bringing game series into 3DS for the sake of it, if they work on creating games for the 3DS that exploit all of its capabilities, they’re bound to come up with new genres – it can do so much that other consoles can’t. It would be very questionable if we didn’t come up with new genres – that would mean we weren’t doing enough. So I have two answers to that question – it should and it will!