Platinum Games' Hideki Kamiya has sat down for a chat with Famitsu about his earlier works. Mr. Kamiya first worked on Resident Evil 2, which went through a rather famous redesign before consumers got it. Kamiya is very open about the original plan for RE2.

"I screwed up once with RE2. It was my first director project, and I really messed things up on it. That was my first real taste of the way that Mikami saw it. If you fail, then you fail for a reason -- I was making too many compromises in my own mind; my directorial skill wasn't there. If you con yourself into making too many compromises, then that's going to affect the quality of the game and screw up the whole thing in the end. The experience gave me a chance to reconsider what I was doing with my career; I guess it was the first time I recognized the value of working under Mikami after all that time."

Kamiya's problems didn't end after RE2. He states that Okami originally started out very rough, to a point where he couldn't even sleep at night.

"When I first started talking about it with [producer Atsushi] Inaba, the only starting point we had for Okami was a game that depicted a lot of nature. I couldn't say 'I don't know if this'll be fun or not' because than nobody on the dev team would be enthusiastic about it, so instead I was like 'This is gonna be great! I know it will!' So eventually the discussion shifted to a wolf running around, and we made this minute-long video depicting a wolf running through a field and trees sprouting up behind him and I told the team 'See, isn't that neat?' Of course, once we settled down from that, we realized that we had no idea what this game was supposed to be like. We had no story, no gameplay system. To make a game out of this video we had to come up with all sorts of rules, but I also had to keep the original concept -- depicting the splendor of nature -- central in people's minds. So I was lost for a little while, but I kept my focus by keeping that concept in mind. Our first test run was incredibly boring to play. I was grinding my teeth at night, I was so worried. At one point, we were so far off-track that it had turned into a simulation game -- you had hexes and trees sprouted on them. It was total garbage. A couple of devs said to me afterwards 'Something was definitely wrong with you around that time, Kamiya!'"

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