Magna Carta II Interview

IncGamers recently caught up with Namco Bandai’s Yoshihisa Kanesaka, producer of Magna Carta II, to find out about the upcoming RPG sequel and what the combination of Eastern and Western styles brings to the game.

What’s new? How is this different to any other RPGs? We’ve seen a lot of RPGs, like Sacred 2 for example, coming out. We’ve seen other games with RPG elements. How is this different to anything else that’s out there?

The biggest difference from other RPG titles will be in the combat system. We are using traditional turn-based battles, as well as action-RPG elements, so it’s like a unification of Japanese traditional RPGs and Western market RPGs.

So what’re the Western elements? That’s one of the biggest things – we see a lot of Western elements in Asian-centric games. How do you incorporate both and maintain the cultural founding of the game with the Western traditions and Asian traditions?

Western aspects of RPGs… it could be said that battles should be active and real-time, and obviously Japanese RPGs have turn-based battles. So our goal was to unify the good points of both elements to appeal worldwide.

There’s a lot of mention of parties, and emphasis on parties. How many people are in your party, and do they all have different strengths, or can you have people with the same strengths – for instance, four or five people with lightning powers?

You’ll have six playable characters at the end of the game, but in combat you pick three out of the six playable characters. Each character has different types of skill and different types of Kan, so depending on who you’re fighting against or in which field you’re at, you should be choosing which character to play with.

Does that mean elements in the game – do they define the class of the characters?

There is no difference in strengths between those Kan. The only difference will be that sometimes it’s useful when you’re in… let’s say you have a fire Kan. You will have a big advantage when you’re in the volcano stage. So depending on where you are, you choose which character to use.

So classes are different?

Yes, classes are different.

So what classes are playable? The game has healers, fighters…?

Yes.

So how many classes are there?

We have three classes within the six characters. One could be said to be a warrior type – for example, a character called Argo who has a huge hammer, he can be classified as a warrior type. Other types could be spell type, another could be a multiplayer type.

How big is the game world? The game world is quite important – there must be different areas and maps. What sort of areas are there, and is it open-world?

We have about ten fields that compose this continent’s landscape. You’ll need about forty or fifty hours to complete this game, so the stage itself is really big, and it’s open-world.

One final question: why 360 exclusivity?

When we were planning on developing Magna Carta 2, we were trying to use Unreal Engine 3 from the beginning, and we thought that Xbox 360 was the best machine to utilise it.

Thank you, I hope the game is successful. When are we expecting to see it in shops?

We are releasing Magna Carta 2 in October 2009.