The handwritten notes:
Total length: 8m.
Human flesh is its favorite food.
However, it will eat anything.
Nocturnal and hates sunlight.
They say it digs holes and sleeps during the day.
Incredibly short-tempered!
(and for the little cat-spider)
Its child. Born from eggs.
"I intended to design a pure bakeneko, but while playing around with different ideas, it became a cat-spider. Doesn't the thought of something like this lurking underground make you afraid to walk into a bamboo grove...?" (Inoue)
Full interview: shmuplations.com/guwange
He may also be making a subtle jab at the secondary publishing world of guidebooks and strategy guides (extremely big in Japan then, as you probably know), which were often very crass about helping you find "ALL THE SECRETS!!"
Since he doesn't elaborate further we'll never know exactly what he was referring to, but I took it simply to mean games with lots of obscure, non-intuitive secrets, or games where that is a main hook/advertising point.
Some early concept art for Kosame in Guwange. Her design underwent many changes, and she was originally called "Emi".
Full interview: shmuplations.com/guwange
Cave without context, vol.65535
Did you know a sequel was planned for Guwange?! I love those designs! Alas, it seems it never got beyond the initial planning/concept stage.
Inoue shares some of the influences of Guwange. Princess Mononoke probably comes as no surprise, but Genpei Touma Den is less known in the West (it was a massive hit in Japanese arcades)
A couple neat passages to highlight: here Inoue shares the NSFW final boss that almost was...
This week we have a special treat for shmup fans: a rare Guwange interview with character designer Junya Inoue! For fans of Cave's haunting Muromachi-era danmaku, this interview covers it all: the influences, game design, challenges, concept art, characters, and more! shmuplations.com/guwange
I saw someone describe the tone as "unguarded" and I thought that was perfect. It's really one of the advantages of reading these old interviews; Japanese speakers self-censor a lot if they are afraid of being misunderstood.
Well, that wraps up the first "Saturday Shmuplations" thread! Tune in later this week for our newest translated interview, Cave's Guwange!
I've actually got a couple more Bushido Blade interviews left to translate... looking forward to that! Our backlog of untranslated material is indexed here, by the way: shmuplations.com/patreonlist/
Did you know Bushido Blade used motion capture, inspired by historical Japanese dramas? (jidaigeki)
One last lookback: Bushido Blade! Released on March 14th, 1997 in Japan, there has never been a fighting game like it since. In these two interviews director Kunihiko Nakata explains the reasoning behind all those unique design choices.
shmuplations.com/bushidoblade/
Lots of neat insights within, here's two: director Chihiro Fujioka describes a mushroom idea that got abandoned and Nintendo's policy on weapons.
The big event this week, of course, is Super Mario RPG's 30th anniversary. These four interviews remain the only contemporary account of SMRPG's development and are well-worth reading!
shmuplations.com/supermariorpg/
I was listening to a jp podcast years ago, and a woman was describing her husband's gaming life: "he plays Chrono Trigger, then a few months later, he plays Chrono Trigger again. Sometimes I see him taking forever to decide what to play, and when I come back he's just playing Chrono Trigger again."
Our other big Chrono Trigger interview looks more at the battle system mechanics, and includes some nostalgic reminiscing with Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yoshinori Kitase.
shmuplations.com/chronotrigger/
March 11th marks the 31st anniversary of Chrono Trigger, and shmuplations has a good spread of content for Square's timeless classic. This collection of pre-release interviews covers the story, characters, gameplay, and graphics in equal turn. shmuplations.com/chronotrigge...
I'll be choosing interviews that line up with this week's upcoming release anniversaries, developer birthdays, and other important events. Without further ado then...
Today I'm starting a new weekly tradition called "Saturday Shmuplations" to highlight some of the greatest hits from our archive of over 500 translated interviews. The weekend is the perfect time to relax and revisit these long-form, deep-dive slices of gaming history!
"MIYAMOTO SAYS GAME SECRETS ARE PORNOGRAPHY"
Glad to see everyone enjoying the Miyamoto and Itoi interview! I honestly thought all the "big" early Miyamoto interviews had been found, so it was quite the discovery. Also nice to see most of the engagement hasn't been too click-baity, hehe
Attention all Cyberbots: Fullmetal Madness fans! With thanks to @shmuplations.bsky.social you can now enjoy English story mode translations of the console exclusive characters. Have closed captions turned on. First up, Shade:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lue...
Having just finished Tunic for the first time I very much agree! I also remember fumbling through DQV as a teenager when I was first learning Japanese, and how "mystical" that game was to me then. That was back when you had to break the plastic tabs off your SNES to play imports, haha...
Miyamoto should've done more interviews in 1989 because this is like reading a wizard talk. This snippet distills why playing games in another language has always been so appealing to me. (And also reminds me why Tunic is such a masterpiece.)
I love the poetry of this exchange, and it certainly presages Nintendo's increasingly open-world game design from the 90s onwards. shmuplations.com/itoimiyamoto/
nice! that will be a huge help for researchers/translators, i know how tedious that work is. there was one jp site, now defunct i believe, that did a similar indexing for all of Gamest.
the feeling is mutual! i can't imagine how much work+money it must have taken to archive all these (actually, i've read your blog posts so I have some idea, haha!) Game PIA, Gamejin, and gM are full of wonderful interviews too.
