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Blast From the Past - Newly-translated interview from 2008 gives us major insight into Monolith Soft's never-localized Soma Bringer
For whatever reason, Soma Bringer on the Nintendo DS was never localized. The lack of localization for Monolith Soft's first original DS project still stings fans the world over. While we may never get to play an official English release of the game, we can finally get some insight into how the project was created.
In this newly-translated interview from 2008, Soma Bringer producer Tetsuya Takahashi and composer Yasunori Mitsuda sit down to discuss the entire project. Check out a snippet below, then hit up the link for the full piece.
At first, we experimented with the format of a standard RPG. However, when thinking about things that were feasible “because it is on the DS"—such as playing with everyone or enjoying the game even if only playing in short bursts at a time—we thought that an action RPG was more appropriate for what we wanted to make, so we discarded what we’d worked on so far and remade it from scratch. I believe that, as a result, we managed to express the feeling of exhilaration and speed, which only exists in action games, quite well.
We also experimented with the creation of the scenario this time around. Up until now, when creating a game for a home console we’d first have the scenario, then we’d build the game system to match it. However, this time around, we first decided what kind of game we wanted to make, then made rough estimates of the resources we could use, then assessed how many chapters and dungeons could be made, and then in regards to those we created eight characters and finally considered how to split the scenario up. So rather than building a game for the sake of showing an existing scenario off, I believe that this title’s theme and world were naturally built based upon the game format we wanted to make.