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Grasshopper's Suda 51

On the Wii, No More Heroes - and bowel movements.

Rob Fahey avatar
Interview by Rob Fahey Contributor
Published on
Eurogamer(Once everyone had stopped holding their heads in their hands and blushing...) Why did the Wii appeal to you? What was it about the console that made you want to focus on that for your next game?
Suda 51

The key thing is about the beam katana in the game - it matches really well with the controller. I just felt that instinctively.

EurogamerYou don't have direct control of the beam katana, though - instead you have more conventional controls, with special moves and height adjustment on the motion sensors. Was that a compromise you had to make during development?
Suda 51

Actually, I really expected that other games on the Wii would already have used the remote in that way by now - and I know that a lot of gamers prefer the kind of controls you get on a classic device. I wanted to get the best of both worlds, adding elements of classic controls to the motion sensing device.

I expected that everyone would be doing pure motion sensing controls, and thought it would be better to combine the two - that using the Wii remote for things like fatal moves and height would be better, would feel more refreshing.

EurogamerA lot of Wii games are designed for families, not necessarily for children but for a wide audience. This is obviously an adult game, even with black clouds rather than blood sprays; it's still full of swearing and sexual references, and a lot of violence. Do you think the Wii is a good platform for adult games, or will this look a bit out of place on the shelf next to Mario Galaxy?
Suda 51

I had really expected that more titles for adults would be launched for the Wii, and I've been really surprised by the reality - that most of the games are for families, or kids. That's not only in Japan, it's the same all over the world, and I didn't expect things to be that way.

EurogamerThe retro arcade graphics in the game's interface are really fun, but they look a bit strange in a game in 2008 - what made you decide to go along with that look?
Suda 51

The main reason for adding the retro graphics was that, while this game is set in a fictional city, it's really inspired by the 1970s and 1980s, the generations that grew up in those decades, especially in California. Retro games are from that generation - the Atari 2600, stuff like that. I wanted to include those elements because it gives some real atmosphere to the setting of the game.

EurogamerYou've talked in the past about being interested in multiplayer - did you plan any multiplayer options in No More Heroes, or is that something you still want to explore at some later time?
Suda 51

To be honest, I'm not really into multiplayer modes. I might do something like that in the future, maybe... I'm not saying that I don't like it, it's just that it's not a priority for me to add that kind of thing into my games.

EurogamerWe can't leave this without asking about the black clouds in the European and Japanese version, as opposed to the blood in the American version. A lot of people feel like our version is censored, but the response has been that this is the original version - so simply, which version do you prefer personally?
Suda 51

Actually, I can't really say which is better. It's an action game, at the end of the day, and in some ways I feel like the black clouds make the European version feel more refreshing and more direct than the American one, when you're playing it. It's really hard to compare, though.

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