TYPE-MOON Studio BB

[Ubergeneral]

No new info. Is this game doooooooomed????

[OnesFleetingGlory]

The director seemed eager to make people perish that thought with his recent tweet.

[pinetree]

We got a new trailer 6 months ago. It's fine.

[Reign]

They're still working on it.

[Oz1337]

Thank you for confirming you still exist Studio BB, see you in half a year to remind us again that you exist.

[Namelesss]

At this point idc about this game anymore I'm curious what other games studio BB are making.

[ProtoformX]

Sakura Five dancing rhythm game

[FalLoShann]

Cooking

Mama

Nameless

2: Dinner with Criticism. + DLC for Kiara, Hans and Edgemiya.

[Catastor]

An update from Nino, they've at least produced up to Round 5.

[OnesFleetingGlory]

Round 5 of how many rounds in total?

[Catastor]

The main game has 7 rounds + Twice as the final boss. They've said they have no intentions of changing the story so that means the game should be over halfway finished.

[Ubergeneral]

Now that I think about it, this game has the same development cycle as F/SR. Both games started their development cycle before the pandemic. The difference is that F/SR didn't announce that anything was happening until 8 months before release.

[Paulie25]

An update from Nino, they've at least produced up to Round 5.

I’ve been meaning to tell people this but I’m pretty sure game development isn’t linear, I don’t think they create things just in chronological order necessarily.

[madarra]

The main game has 7 rounds + Twice as the final boss. They've said they have no intentions of changing the story so that means the game should be over halfway finished.

except for claiming they`d remove the Mana transfers between servant of choice and Rin/Rani because it was only added at Ninou`s insistence


and the implied sex is during round 5

[Ubergeneral]

So anyone wish this game had Elizabeth bathroy? I kinda wish Vlad would be replaced by her.

maybe they will make her a playable servant via DLC. Fate extra just isn't the same without her.

[Kirishima]

Fate Extra just isn't Fate Extra without the character who wasn't ever there in the first place.

[TomPen94]

Elizabeth will get her turn when CCC is remade in 2134.

[Comun]

I want Eliza to replace Vlad but only if you play his week on October 31st.

[Comun]

This may not be the best thread for it since it barely mentions Record, but it’s a Niinou interview, so I’ll talk about it here. 8 days ago, Shizuma Rock from Faminico Gamer posted an interview with Nasu, Niinou, and Ishikawa Natsuko as a belated celebration of CCC’s 10th anniversary. Unfortunately, I can’t translate this one. Ishikawa’s career has grown a lot since the CCC days, so nowadays she’s more famous as the writer for Shadowbringers, Endwalker, and, quoting the friend I consulted about this: “literally every time FF14’s story is good”. For that reason, this interview talks a lot about Final Fantasy 14 and I have none of the context necessary to cover it. With no signs of anyone picking up the interview these past few days, what I can do is post this summary of the interview skipping the FF parts as needed.

Intro: Games they've been playing lately

As an initial icebreaker, Shizuma asks the CCC trio what games they’ve been playing lately. Niinou’s answer is EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6. Nasu also played EDF6 at Niinou’s recommendation. Nasu’s game of 2022 was Elden Ring, which is pretty antithetical to EDF6, but Nasu love how the latter’s story added meaning to the repetitive nature of the gameplay. He was always on the same page as the characters when it came to the plot’s mysteries and was fully invested in the conflict to save humanity’s future. Shizuma hasn’t played the game, but he trusts Nasu saying it was that good.

Ishikawa has been playing a lot of Eastward lately but what she really has on her mind is: “When is the next chapter of Deltarune coming out?”. Nasu is waiting until Deltarune is fully released. Undertale is another game he didn’t play when it came out because he was busy with FGO part 1, but then Undertale was THE game of his post-part 1 long vacation. Ishikawa prefers the episodic release and keeps up with Toby’s newsletter.

Another game Nasu played lately is Paranormasight. One question he had when making A Piece of Blue Glass Moon was “How much budget do modern VNs spend on image?” so he bought Paranormasight to get his belated answer. He found the game’s positioning tricks really clever and the story hooked him enough to get him to spend a whole night awake playing for the first time since Raging Loop. The 80s setting was also nostalgic to him.

About CCC

A lot of fans, both of Final Fantasy and Type-Moon, are unaware that Ishikawa was one of CCC’s main writers, so first Shizuma asks to clarify what exactly her involvement with the game was. Nasu says that the original plan for the EXTRA series was to let IMAGEEPOCH handle everything with minimal involvement from Type-Moon. Partway through development, Nasu tested Extra’s beta ROM and it was bad, so they reached an agreement that Type-Moon would write the story.

Since the days of EXTRA’s production, Niinou was really intent on making a sequel full of Sakuras. Type-Moon at the time didn’t have the time or money for this, but Niinou’s CCC project pitch was too good to pass, so it was decided that Nasu would write the story while the rest of Type-Moon remained uninvolved. However, the schedule was too tight for Nasu to write all 7 chapters, so other writers had to be called to make chapters 4 and 5. Ishikawa had done some tutorial parts for the original EXTRA, so she was called to write chapter 5. The chapter centered on Elizabeth Bathory.

Ishikawa says that at first, she was just a secretary called all of a sudden to keep records of a meeting about Fate/EXTRA, which escalated into her doing odd jobs on the actual game development, which escalated into her being officially hired for CCC as the dev who decides where the side quests happen and what are their rewards, which escalated into her writing for the main story.

Nasu/Niinou/Ishikawa relationships

Nasu’s comments on Ishikawa
CCC’s development was a real race against time, so Ishikawa didn’t have the chance to request new character expressions, locations, and BGM for chapter 5 like Nasu usually likes his writers to do. They simply needed someone who could write a chapter fast and Ishikawa was who Niinou had available. Nasu was initially worried this was too much for a complete novice, but there the team discovered Ishikawa’s potential.

Ishikawa’s comments on Nasu
Ishikawa back then was deeply impression by Nasu’s way of writing scripts, always full comments serving as “stage directions” for the devs, clarifying things about the characters’ emotional state, explaining what foreshadowing ties to what, and an amazingly frequent amount of “this part was originally a typo but I think the dialogue looks better this way”.

Ishikawa thinks the most memorable part of his work was in a Jinako/Karna scene where the script had a huge blank space with a note reading “I wrote some amazing Jinako/Karna dialogue last night but forgot to save. Wait until I’m inspired again.” Nasu doubles down here that the unsaved Jinako scene would have been the best-written part of CCC.

Niinou’s comments on Ishikawa
Ishikawa’s story with Niinou is that they first met in her interview to work in IMAGEEPOCH. Niinou chose her for the job because he was needing someone good at flavor text. Her first job was writing NPC dialogue for side quests in 7th Dragon. Niinou quickly noticed how good she was at this and started gradually giving her more creative control over her jobs. When resigning from his work in A Realm Reborn, Niinou recommended her to Yoshida Naoki, and before he knew it, she was the hero of FF14’s main story.

Niinou’s comments on Nasu
As for Niinou’s contact with Nasu, what’s most memorable was Nasu walking into their office after that really bad first ROM of EXTRA and staying with them day and night to get the story done. Niinou admits that until that experience, he didn’t value the plot of his games enough. He thought flavor text and a twist were all they needed to string things together. He was always a fan of Tsukihime, but he simply liked the story and the lore from a superficial player perspective. Nasu is the one who made him understand what goes into writing.

Nasu’s comments on Niinou
Nasu values Niinou’s ability to see his creations from a player perspective and sees him as a man with a strong principle of never wanting to “make the same game twice”, which is why the Fate/EXTRA series, FF14: A Realm Reborn, and Dragon Quest Builders are so different from each other. Niinou has a clear vision of what he wants and doesn’t settle for less, which is why every scene in CCC went through a hellish amount of retakes.

His retake files were marked by mercilessly harsh comments on why that cut didn’t work (Example: this composition lacks tension. Try to understand Chara A and Chara B’s mental state before you put them on the screen Make the cut actually enjoyable to watch.) but those were always followed by concrete advice on what to do (Example: Reposition the camera, I think we can draw more tension showing this cut from above. A better call here would be not to show their faces. Place the camera specifically here.) He’s a director who brings solutions instead of just complaining. He even provides advice not applicable to the scene, just for the worker’s future reference. To him, everything is the director’s responsibility. Nasu would have cared a lot less about CCC’s writing if Niinou wasn’t so driven to make a good game.

Niinou then moved to Square Enix, much to Nasu’s disappointment, as Nasu saw him more as a niche creator than as an employee in the corporate giants. Dragon Quest Builders then came out and Nasu thought Niinou was finally defanged, but then he actually played the game and was blown away by how it was so simultaneously antithetical to DQ and full of love for the franchise and how the story integrated the gameplay theme of building. That was the Niinou he knew. The man with a concrete vision and ideals.

Ishikawa’s comments on Niinou
Ishikawa worked for a long time as a secretary keeping records of Niinou’s meetings, so she got to see him in an environment the rest of the staff can’t know about. She saw how he presented project pitches and could tell that his pitches were incredibly detailed. As Nasu put it, he starts with a concrete vision always and knows how to take the smoothest route to create exactly what he envisioned.

The rest of her comment is FF14 talk. How he got her involved in the game, how the two of them created Haurchefant’s character together, the necessities of the MMO format, etc.

Writer authority in FF vs FGO

The next question is about how Ishikawa’s experience in CCC affected her work in FF14. She explains that she adopted Nasu’s habit of commenting on scripts as “stage directions” because devs tend to ignore writer opinions but if her opinions are delivered as comments in the actual script, they’re a lot more likely to be respected and followed. FF14’s production goes through too many hands, so the script isn’t valued the way they came to be value in Niinou’s games after Nasu changed Niinou’s perspective. The game’s format pretty much never bends itself to the writer’s will.

Niinou posits that game creators grew complacent to the idea that story is just cutscenes and you don’t have to think hard about it. He believes in the importance of experiments with new, more cinematic, and more artistic ways to present a game’s story. He cites early FGO’s total lack of visual effects vs the flair of recent FGO story scenes. He believes the evolution of FGO’s presentation is a microcosm of the future evolution of how writers and programmers will eventually interact.

The process until London was that the writers made the script, sent it for implementation, and then the devs would make their own requests like “20 textboxes max on this chapter” or “insert a battle between this and this”. Higashide and Sakurai were very unsatisfied with this model, but Nasu couldn’t suddenly change the process, so he opted for a slow shift of importance toward the story. He gathered player opinions to prove that the fans wanted more story, and so E Pluribus Unum could start to make things different. In the first half of part 1, the story existed for the game’s benefit, but from this point on, the game exists for the story’s benefit.
This point about about what exists for what’s benefit makes Ishikawa trace the history of writers having no rights to the conflict between writers who don’t care about gameplay making stories that don’t fit their games vs game devs forced to apply impossible narratives to their games. It was a long-standing conflict that devs were winning but nowadays the tides are beginning to turn. It’s a power imbalance with no solution in sight for the near future.

Shimazu posits that the turning point of the times was the big games of his high school days: Persona 5, Xenoblade 2, and 13 Sentinels. Nasu praises the interviewer’s selection of favorites but jokes that he should also try out weirder things so he won’t suffer from having too high standards. Nasu recalls a conversation from 2 decades ago that went basically like:

Nasu: “I’ll beat one game a week, including bad games, for variety’s sake!”
Urobuchi: “Don’t waste your precious time.”
Nasu: “What?!”
Urobuchi: “Playing bad games is bad!”
Nasu: “But how will I know what’s bad if I don’t play bad games?”

Difference between single-release games and live service games

The next question is what’s on the section title. Ishikawa’s answer is that a single-release game needs to produce a solidified world while a live service needs to constantly enable new ingredients to be added to the soup. Instead of having a final goal to aim for, live services need only to drop hooks for the next writer to pick up. Her metaphor is that a console game is a seafood bowl while a live-service game is a variety buffet.

Nasu’s metaphor is that a console game is a sprint race where all of your energy is poured into a short burst of movement, while a live service game is a marathon with no finish line. The only finish line is the point where you drop dead. It’s a chase for an illusory star always beyond your reach, full of obstacles along your way.

Another Nasu metaphor is that writing a console game is like publishing a crafted piece of art and writing live service is like performing on a stage. You can see the audience during the performance and their reactions affect the way you perform.

Another major difference is that live service writing is not something one can do alone. It’s constructing a world together with other writers. The final level of quality is not predictable but story-driven live service games are unmatched in how they can expand a world’s lore and how gratifying they are to create for. Though Nasu feels embarrassed that he’s saying this before properly wrapping up Part 2.

FF14 is also 10 years old and with no real ending in sight. Nasu knows some people who, at this point, don’t know how to live without FF14. It’s for people like this that Nasu wants live service games to continue, but Nasu himself can’t continue for long because his age is catching up to him.

Writer authority again

Shizuma asks about dramatic jumps in presentations like Avalon le Fae or Shadowbringers. Nasu answers that, from his experience, the new visual effects to make the storytelling feel fresh and gameplay gimmicks to make the newer enemies seem strong are always the writer’s ideas.

FGO part 1 was made by a team barely scraping, with no one being able to do what they wanted. For that reason, the future parts restructured the teams to do everything possible to fulfill the writer’s requests. The writers have the proactive role in the game’s creative decisions, so absurd ideas, like replacing all the default BGM tracks for part 2, get through (although that’s a thing Nasu requested 2 years in advance).

Meanwhile, Ishikawa had to insist a lot just to give her NPCs different dialogue before and after an expansion’s story conclusion. But she has more leverage on this because she knows the schedule of the other sectors, thus she knows who will be able to attend to her requests and when. A guest writer wouldn’t be able to get their requests through like she can.

Niinou’s recent work practices, however, have been the opposite of how FGO and FF14 work. Niinou first creates the whole gameplay loop, lets his writer test-play it, and the writer makes the story based on this experience. This of course requires being able to predict what the writer will deliver to a certain extent, so it’s not viable for inexperienced directors. But Niinou wants to make one last story-driven game with Nasu before he dies, so he needs to study his options there in terms of “will story or gameplay be made first”.

Another trick Niinou learned to employ with his director experience is to lure the writers toward certain development by preemptively producing assets he knows they will want to use in their scripts. He even learned to draw storyboards for EXTRA Record. It’s a new route of communication that he’s still not used to, but he started his career as a designer, so drawing his composition ideas is not really difficult. Ishikawa is surprised it took him this long to start practicing this habit.

How to write

Ishikawa’s method
Ishikawa’s workflow starts with verifying what the producer and director want to achieve and to what audience. Next, she studies how long the game will be, the size of the team, and roughly how many assets they can produce. Next is the project theme, which in CCC’s case was “Sakura Everywhere”. From there she decides how far she can delve into the themes within the assessed condition. She sees characters and worldbuilding as tools to reach the themes.

Nasu’s method
Depends on the medium. For novels, he writes one sentence and then builds everything for the goal of delivering this one sentence. This only works because novel writing is a solo work. Game-making is antithetical to solo work. For VNs, he creates the characters and world together; crafts notes listing the characters, worldbuilding elements, and the theme they ultimately try to achieve; and then fleshes it out from there. Also, games take years to make, so he needs to include something that sells. For example, his idea for making Tsukihime sell was to have the strongest character, and that’s how he settled on Arcueid as the main heroine. Meanwhile, Takeuchi’s selling idea was “maids maids maids!”. Besides, due to Tsukihime’s genre, he had decided on how to make the player fall in love with the heroines first before he could think about the story’s overarching themes and each heroine’s themes.

Lastly FGO. Nasu believes the most important element of an RPG is traveling across a world until you ultimately watch that world end. That was the goal for FGO but the constraint of the mobile genre is that every month a banner character that wasn’t in the initial plan gets dropped on them and they need to write a story for this banner character. And then there’s the main story character. The writer gets to choose half of the lineup on this one. For example, Nasu commissioned two Latin American gods for Nahui Mictlan because of the South American setting. Characters are decided roughly 2 years before their playable release, with the process of writing their profiles, asking the illustrator to design them, and then making the battle sprite taking a whole year. Every year, they settle on how many men or women, how many good guys and bad guys they want to be released that year, form the lineup, and from there the writers decide on which characters each of them want to work on. With the roster distributed, they make each character’s base lore, with frequent doses of “Hey, I think I can use your character in my chapter”.

Mobile game writing requires improvisation skills above all. Situations, including events, will change your initial plans for the main story and its themes, but you need to do what you can to keep everything from going off the rails.

Niinou’s method
Niinou is a director rather than a writer, but his projects include mini-summaries of the plot. His first question at work is “What do people want to play?”. He composes his pitches to be as consistent as possible on this element, and thanks to this approach, he rarely ever got his project refused. Etrian Odyssey was made from the idea that a game where you draw a map on graph paper with a DS stylus would sell like water, and DQ Builders came from the wish to play a sandbox RPG with a proper plot. Thinking about what people want to play is easier than it sounds because “people” don’t have to be a large number. A lot of people ask him to review their projects and most of the time it’s high-quality games that lack a draw that makes people want them. If no one at the presentation is saying “I like this project!”, approving it does more harm than good. If you can’t convince others that your idea is interesting, that idea needs more time in the oven.

His project documents also add visual flair to be convincing. The pitch for Last Ranker, for example, ended on a collage of epic manga scenes and a message reading “Dedicated to the adults who never stopped loving these kinds of scenes growing up”.

Niinou’s comments on Nasu’s method

Hearing Nasu’s RPG comment combined with his recollections of his favorite FGO chapters (Camelot and Nahui Mictlan) prompted Niinou to comment about his image of Nasu as a man who wants to portray the best-looking end of the world possible. This comment is relevant to the game Niinou wants to make with Nasu.

Another aspect of Nasu’s writing process that Niinou feels Nasu neglected to mention is character themes. Nasu once mentioned that after he concludes a character’s theme, he loses the will and ability to write this character again. Conversely, when a character still has things to write about, Nasu can easily wipe up a continuation of their story. Niinou is taking this opportunity to ask how exactly Nasu's concept of “character themes” works.

Nasu explains that themes are the skeleton of stories. You can’t make stories without themes and if someone says their story doesn’t have a theme, that in itself is a theme. But character themes are a thing he does separately from the story theme. A character’s theme is their life. It’s what cohesively defines how they lived, what major events they were part of, and what will be their last words. Characters live in the flow of their narrative, and there they need their own themes to survive. For example, Arthuria Pendragon is a character who already delivered the conclusion to her thematic questions, so it’s not interesting to keep showing days of her life. It would deviate from the process of establishing to the reader what the character is about.

Ishikawa agrees that she can write about finished characters if requested, but that will ring hollow unless the circumstances are really opportune. Nasu outright can’t do it for his more popular characters. What made them popular is how the writer poured their heart and soul into the character’s completion, with no room left to explore.

Meanwhile, Nasu also has characters like Merlin. Merlin’s general theme and stance is that he wants to watch the personal endings of each hero and main character, so he can keep appearing in stories indefinitely. But if a character makes a conclusive statement that they live to beat Elden Ring, there’s no need to feature this character again after they’re done playing Elden Ring.

That is a huge part of why he didn’t want the original Arthuria featured much in FGO. But, there’s also the case of Arthuria Caster, who looks identical but carries different themes, so gets fully written as a separate character.

Wak Chan love

On the topic of how to make characters appealing, Niinou claims Nasu’s best recent character is Wak Chan. He is the main representative of how the deinos look savage but are actually very intelligent, so Nasu’s request to Chuuou when commissioning Wak Chan design was to make him both a cartoonish and realistic dinosaur, coupling the impact of a T-rex figure with a lovable face”. Thinking back, this sounds as challenging as the average Niinou request.

Wak Chan’s design was perfect and that was a great source of inspiration when Nasu wrote his scenes. The point to make here is that making characters appealing is not something Nasu does alone. Designers and voice actors matter. Nasu is at his most enjoyable writing state when he receives a finished design and imagines the character’s action through that design.

There are two types of directors: those who test if the commissioned design matches their imagined character, and those who see good design that doesn’t fit and change their imagined character to fit that design. Nasu is majorly the latter.

Ishikawa brings up worldbuilding when relevant to where the character grew up and lives. This is especially essential in single-release games, where there’s a greater need to make the world cohesive, as mentioned before.

The interviewer’s faves

Shizuma mentions that his favorite characters are Hermes and Yotsuyu in FF14 and Hope in FGO. Characters tend to resonate with him the most in their biggest moment of weakness. Ishikawa and Nasu agree that if a character is cool 100% of the time, that will feel like a mask. Moments of weakness are what make them feel natural as human beings. This whole talk is centered on an example of Hermes erasing his own memories or something to that effect, so let me know if there’s any nuance I’m missing by not knowing his character.

Narration

In a 180 turn from the character questions, Shizuma asks about 3rd person narration prose, which he considers to be Nasu’s and Ishikawa’s specialty. Nasu likens third-person narration to a brainwashing device. It’s God’s perspective, the facts as observed by fate itself, so it’s free from all sorts of character bias, meaning when the narration says something, the reader will believe it without question. But overusing it can turn a game into a novel. Nasu believes that in the games, the plot must be accompanied by images, so he tries his best to minimize the narration. A game needs to communicate only through visuals and in-character comments.

Ishikawa expresses the same sentiment that narration hits hard because it’s only used to express unshakeable facts. What the narration says goes, no questions asked.

Niinou also loves narration. Some people at Studio BB say Fate/EXTRA had too much narration and needed to be trimmed down to fix the game’s pacing, but Niinou refuses to trim it. The alternative solution they’re working on for EXTRA Record is to add more gameplay things to do between each story scene, so instead of having a sluggish block of prose, the game will make the player crave for those narration bits before they come.

Nasu thanks Niinou for going through such a costly process for the game. But as someone who played CCC 8 times after its release, Nasu understands the problem. CCC had a lot of “walk one step, narration, walk one step, narration, walk one step, narration”.

Protagonists

The narration talk segways into Shizuma praising the way the Warrior of Light in FF14 and Hakuno in CCC are their own characters with full monologue and their own decisions independent from the player. They’re still avatars for the player on some level, but they’re also their own characters with very distinctive identities.

Hakuno and Fujimaru
Nasu agrees that Hakuno has a very solid identity but clarifies that he wrote their monologues portraying them as an extension of the player first and foremost. Hakuno’s monologues avoid speaking in absolute terms whenever possible to prevent a disagreement between the player and Hakuno from causing a disconnect.

But whenever Hakuno is sad, there is an established reason for them to be sad. The player projecting into Hakuno isn’t meant to be “Hakuno is sad because I’m sad”, it’s meant to be “Yeah if I was in their shoes, that would make me sad too”. All of their emotional outbursts must come from consistently believable sentiments. Fujimaru also has a personality defined by FGO’s themes, but he writes Fujimaru in a way that their personality won’t be a distraction for the player. Fujimaru’s personality shows mostly in the joke dialogue options that show in genuinely ridiculous moments or their moments of weakness, but the important thing about their characterization is that they’re doing what they can to be part of this world and that they retain their ability to appreciate flowers and poetry even in the most distressing situations.

Warrior of Light
Every numbered Final Fantasy protagonist saves the world, so 14’s WoL can have any race and appearance, as long as they save the world. How they feel about the process of saving the world is entirely up to choices. They’re will be joke options and serious options all the time, but never options where they actively enjoy injustices because they need to have the personality of someone who would save the world. Having these limited dialogue options makes them an imperfect player avatar, but much like Nasu, most of her stories have an ending in mind and she needs to make a protagonist that would reach that ending.

More on Fujimaru
In a game with one writer, the protagonist’s actions are shaped by the writer’s values, but live service games have multiple writers and their perspectives very often show in the protagonist. They have a base character sheet that all writers share, but there’s a fascinating element to how the main character feels differently depending on the writer. And since the final destination is always defined, one writer getting too off-track can always be salvaged.

Another major element that “mitigates” inconsistency is how Fujimaru's character is often dealt with through choices. There are always multiple options for how they express themselves. Although FGO’s tight character limits mean they often need to use the options mechanic to deliver two halves of the same sentence instead. Contrast with Shiki, who is a completely independent character and his choices merely represent the branches of fate.

More on Hakuno
Hakuno is a character that looks bland to ultimately shock the player with how not normal they are. Ishikawa points to CCC’s Dog Space scene as the best example of Hakuno characterization. Hakuno is deeply immersive, but they also develop a lot as the story goes, and through that Nasu wants the players to develop the same way. There’s no better entertainment than feeling like you personally experienced the simulation. Nasu cites Gridman Universe as a masterful example of what he’s talking about.

Everyone’s favorite Final Fantasy

Niinou: 11 because of how sudden, absurd, and underexplained everything is. It’s the game that taught him that introductions and foreshadowing aren’t strictly necessary.

Ishikawa: 6 because she prefers character emotion being conveyed by pixel art instead of through fully drawn faces, but 8 has the best ending because of how it conveys character emotions without words. Shizuma agrees Seifer fishing is peak.

Nasu: 4 is the game that made him fall in love with RPGs as he played it for 3 days nonstop when it came out, but 1’s Garland twist makes it the best.

Hilariously sidetracked closing words

Shizuma thanked the participants for the interview with a speech about how CCC and FF14 are important games that had a tangible impact on his life. CCC and the original EXTRA were the formative games of his student days that made him care so much about storytelling in video games. FF14 was his first MMO and that made him a more sociable person. These two games became part of his personal growth, which is the most desirable comment their creators could receive. This kind of response is what makes Nasu proud of what he wrote.
Ishikawa comments Nasu is particularly good at giving his stories a lasting effect, primarily because he knows how to make the last sentence of the story hit. Her go-to example for that is her favorite Type-Moon story: Tsuki no Sango. She’s a fan of how the warmth of each scene is tangible despite minimal explanations of what’s happening, but the last sentence is where it’s truly beautiful.

Nasu feels like all his struggles and anxieties regarding Tsuki no Sango were rewarded by this comment. Tsuki no Sango’s production was a special challenge. He was hired to make a short story for Sakamoto Maaya to recite at a Christmas event, for an audience primarily of couples spending their romantic Christmas together in a theater. Nasu only did that this once and never wants to do it again because he doesn’t think he can handle the burden of a happy couple potentially breaking up because of the bad ending he wrote for a story on their jolliest day of the year.

He actually accepted the Tsuki no Sango commission despite the challenges and conditions of the job because it was a time when Type-Moon wasn’t announcing anything so he felt a need to prove to the world that he was alive (metaphorically). He put so much energy into Tsuki no Sango because he saw it as his display of commitment. He’s glad it’s serving as such a source of motivation for Ishikawa.

Shizuma mentions that sometimes he drops some really inspiring games right before the finale because he doesn’t want them to be over. It’s a thing he did for Mahoyo and for Haurchefant’s story. Niinou, on the other hand, loves the feeling of loss that comes after the game is finished. The flashbacks to the story, the BGM that can leave your head, and life continuing as normal despite all that. In that sense, the original Tsukihime was the most important game of his life. He even ported Tsukihime to his phone back in the day so that he could read on the train.

As Nasu mentioned before, especially in Tsukihime and Fate/, writing an enjoyable story isn’t enough, there’s also an essential need to make you love a character. He’s aiming to give every player their ideal man or woman so it will hurt more later. Half-quoting Gridman Universe, humans are the only species capable of loving fiction, and a person who can love fiction can love reality. Nasu’s work is always about the meaning of loving someone and the pain of losing someone.

[Reign]

I had no idea Ishikawa worked on CCC, that's cool.

Shizuma mentions that his favorite characters are Hermes and Yotsuyu in FF14 and Hope in FGO. Characters tend to resonate with him the most in their biggest moment of weakness.

Hermes is based, but a Yotsuyu fan boooo. Lowest point of the entire game was her stuff in the Stormblood patches.