PlatinumGames' Atsushi Inaba talks Vanquish

As I said earlier, the main concept was to make shooting and action coexist in one game. It was really hard to get the balance right between these two elements. That was the core idea that could make or break the game. That was one thing.

Also it was hard to achieve our goals. Initially we had very high expectation in terms of the graphical quality. We always struggle to realise it within the limit of a machine's power.

The initial goal we set out when we started working on this project, it would have needed probably 10 times the machine power of what we have right now.

The situation in this project was special because before, Platinum had no previous experience with PS3. We had to start from scratch. We had to study the console and try to figure out what we could do with this machine.

At first we had this prototype on PC. That was the design goal of what we would like to achieve. At the same time we started to build up our know-how on PS3 from scratch. As we got better in handling PS3, only then were we able to strategise what features we were going to keep and what we were going to throw away from PC.

That was a pretty lengthy and painful process. It's not like we knew the limit of PS3 from the beginning. Some of it was due to our lack of previous knowledge about PS3.

If you look at it right now, actually the PS3 version looks much better than the PC prototype. As a game developer we have pretty good knowledge and know-how about tuning the graphics.

For this title there is no difference between PS3 and Xbox, so you can be assured you'll get exactly identical quality.

Both PS3 and Xbox 360 are great platforms. They use very different methods in terms of processing data. They both have good things. It's really important to know how to approach depending on the console you're working on.

But just speaking of media, since Xbox 360 still uses DVD, for games like Vanquish that have a lot of data in one disc and lots of voice over, it's a bit hard to compress everything in one disc. That is the only complaint I have.

We thought we might have to do that during the development but in the end we were able to fit everything in the DVD. So there's nothing we had to cut.

The director of this game, Mikami, he started this genre with his previous work on the Resident Evil series. Resident Evil 4 was really innovative. I still really enjoy that game.

There is no concrete plan or schedule we can talk about here. It's not like Kamiya said, 'Okay, we're going to make this.' But Bayonetta is a special IP for us, and we loved creating that game. We think it was a really good game. So we would love to make a sequel to it, when the time is right. That's all we can say.