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Nintendo talks ARMS early design differences, character lore, Mario Kart influence, fan reaction to Twintelle

by rawmeatcowboy
02 June 2017
GN Version 5.0

A portion of a Game Informer interview with producer Kosuke Yabuki and art director Masaaki Ishikawa...

Game Informer: What did the earliest version of Arms look like?

Kosuke Yabuki: Arms is one of the many prototypes of things. We’re always trying to make new things at Nintendo, and this is one of them. Initially it was a much more simple game with shorter characters who had devices attached to the ends of their hands, but even at the beginning, the camera was still behind the back of the character and that hasn’t changed. We were thinking when making a fighting game, it’s really important, the distance you have between you and your opponent, but it might be difficult to see that difference when the camera’s behind the back of the player. So, with these extending arms, we were working hard to see if there’s anything we could do – any sort of new ideas that we could do – to make that easier. And we officially kicked off the development of this project when we were looking at new techniques and strategies we could have with these extending arms.

GI: In the fiction of Arms, can people elect to have extendable arms? Can they have surgery to do that? Or is just certain people have these arms?

Ishikawa: Some parts of this are still secret. I can’t really tell you everything, but what I can say is it’s not something that they can elect for – not something that you would get surgery for, to replace your arms. It’s possible that some characters have had this since birth and it’s also possible that, for some characters it just suddenly...one day, they woke and were different. So, there are actually, really several different possibilities that could be the cause for this. So, aside from Helix, all the other characters like Spring Man, Ribbon Girl, and Min Min – these are just regular people with extendable arms and not cyborgs or anything like that.

GI: You worked extensively on the Mario Kart series. Mario Kart is obviously a lot different from Arms, but I was wondering if there are any surprise lessons you brought over from Mario Kart into arms?

Yabuki: For Mario Kart Wii we had the steering wheel attachment so players could use motion controls, but you could also play with the motion controller and more traditional controls so that really offered players the freedom to play however they wanted to in Mario Kart. For Arms, we kind of carried this lesson over. Motion controls are a big feature of this game, but players can still use pro controllers or traditional controls like in handheld and choose the way that they would like to play. That’s one of the lessons that we learned from Mario Kart.

The motion controls in Arms actually allow for more fine controls; the two gyros allow for some fine adjustment of left and right on the punches that you can kind of use it to curve your punch. So when it really comes down to it, when you really don’t want to lose, we really feel that motion control offers more precise control than traditional controls. So, unlike any game before, we feel that the motion controls in Arms really allow for deeper technique and strategy than really any game before it with motion controls.

GI: Twintelle has really taken off. What do you think of the fan community latching onto her?

Yabuki: We weren’t really expecting the fans to be so taken with her, so that was a very pleasant surprise! And like I just mentioned, she has that really strong build to her and that seems to be something that the community has picked up on so I’m glad that we were able to create this new character design.

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