WiiNintendo

GI: Are you pretty happy with how the Wiimote works and the sensitivity, and what were your initial thoughts when Nintendo announced this new control scheme?

Shugo Takahashi: When the Wii was initially announced we were very worried about one thing – we thought that the concept was very good, but if you just run with that concept and nothing else you might degrade the value of it to make the games or the machine itself into something cheap or something that’s almost a toy. It’s a very tall hurdle to be able to make a game on a system and stop it from being simply a toy or something that’s not very deep. On the other hand, if you’re able to clear that hurdle you could really create something that feels very new and different from things that have been created before.

GI: If this is successful, is tennis next?

Shugo Takahashi: We don’t know what the order of what things will go in, but we love tennis, and possibly someday it will happen. There are other titles as well that we want to produce. We do want to try a sports game on a sport that we haven’t already tried to make.

Hiroyuki Takahashi: One of the problems is that Camelot is not that big of a company. We have to do things in order, and one-by-one. It may have to wait, but we do want to make it at some point. Possibly with this collaboration with Capcom the staff may change and may become a possibility.

GI: I hate to totally break away from all the sports’ games, but there’s another game Camelot is known for, and that’s Golden Sun. What’s the status of Golden Sun, and is that series finished or is that something you’d like to bring to consoles?

Hiroyuki Takahashi: First of all, I love that game and I love the world of Golden Sun. We think we have to make another one. We have to do it! Not just that we have to do it, but we want to do it. Nintendo has asked us to please make it. But at the same time we haven’t gotten around to making it. We’re not really sure why. (laughs)

Shugo Takahashi: As Camelot, we think of ourselves as being a company that makes RPGs. In an RPG you role-play as another character. In the sports games, you’re role playing as yourself. I want to let the fans know that in the center of our way of thinking the games that we’re making now are close to RPGs. The looks and the concepts might be totally different but the essence of the game contains the RPG. One of the reasons that we haven’t made golden sun is because there are so many fans of the game and we don’t want to do something half-assed. We want to give it the time it deserves.

Hiroyuki Takahashi: There are also many requests to make Shining Force III. At one stage we got a petition with many signatures to make a new Shining Force game. This was sent to Sega, Nintendo and Camelot. There are a lot of people that want us to make that game as well. We don’t know what form it would take, but we want to answer the requests of the fans.

GI: If you did make another Golden Sun would it appear on a portable or would you make it fully realized on a home console?

Hiroyuki Takahashi: As a thought off the top of my head, if I could make something that would combine the handheld and the console – with the past and the future – if I could combine both of those that would be great. But that’s just a thought. (laughs)