Hiroshi Matsuyama x Hiroto Niizato: DIALOGUE Translation [.hack//Archive 04 -Link-]

Disclaimer: The following article is a non-profit fan translation. All .hack title series, including .hack//Link, are owned by CyberConnect2 and Bandai Namco Entertainment. Please buy .hack//ARCHIVE 04 (.hack//Link) Official Complete Documentation Setting and support the official release on the CC2 Store Page.

It has been a year since the release of .hack // Link. A nostalgic conversation between Hiroshi Matsuyama, director of the game at the time, and Hiroto Niizato, planning director, has just come to fruition! The two, who have a strong attachment to the .hack series, talk about their thoughts on the work!

Until the creation of .hack//Link

Hiroshi Matsuyama (Matsuyama): Let me start with the third season of .hack projects. After the release of the trilogy game .hack//G.U. (G.U.), the second season ended with another ending depicted in the theatrical film .hack//G.U. TRILOGY (TRILOGY), and from there onward, the .hack 3rd season project will take on a new look. This project started with the idea of taking a slightly different approach from what we had tried with the .hack series until now.

Hiroto Niizato (Niizato): Not only games, but also manga and anime! While continuing the multifaceted development typical of the .hack series, the third season of this project indeed differed from the previous ones in the way it developed. The project was developed in stages, starting with the manga in 2009, then the game in 2010, the anime in 2011, and the movie in 2012.

Matsuyama: The multimedia development of the 1st and 2nd seasons was a “simultaneous development” in which the game, anime, novel, and manga were all developed simultaneously, with some back and forth, but basically at the same time, and all at once. The third season was not a simultaneous development but rather a sequential development of the manga, game, anime, and movie, one at a time over several years. We decided to do the movie last, which would take the longest, and the game first. In the end, .hack//Link (Link) was released in 2010, but the project itself had already begun in 2008, and development was proceeding in parallel with the production of TRILOGY.

Niizato: The character designer, Seiichiro Hosokawa, assisted me since I was the only one in Link development team.

Matsuyama: The game Link was the first project for the 3rd season, but at the same time, we were working on the manga “.hack//Link: Twilight Knights,” which was based on the same work, and as a result, the manga started first in 2009. The reason was that Kadokawa Shoten had just launched a new monthly magazine called “Kerokero Ace,” targeting a younger age group, and we decided to serialize “.hack//Link: Twilight Knights” from the first issue. So, we started the comic first with the first issue of Kerokero Ace in 2009, followed by the game in 2010, and then the OVA project .hack//Quantum (Quantum) and the movie .hack//Sekai no Mukou ni (Beyond the World) were also in the works. The Beyond the World project was also starting to get underway.

Niizato: The elements that foreshadowed those serial projects were also incorporated into the game. When you complete Link, you can see a prototype animation of the movie Beyond the World. The prototype movie was made in two versions, an animated version, and a CG version, and we ended up making the CG version for the movie. It was positioned as a preview of the next installment to let people know there is more to this project. The bonus booklet with the limited edition of Link also included a preview page for Quantum.

Matsuyama: This kind of thing is one of the best parts of the series, but it is something that only the .hack series can do, as even the main character Sora (PC name in Link is Sora) of the movie that will be released two years later appears in the game as a playable character! I guess that’s something only the .hack series can do, but, well… (Chuckles)

Niizato: I was reckless, wasn’t I? (Chuckles)

I want to bring back the royal feeling of Shonen Manga

Niizato: Speaking of differences from past game titles, the fact that the hardware for Link is now PSP was also significant.

Matsuyama: At the time, the PS2 was already amid a generational shift, and the PSP was experiencing significant growth in Japan. We had already developed a PSP title with the Naruto: ULTIMATE NINJA series, so the idea was to create a new .hack on the PSP, the first portable game console. As Risei Nakata, a producer at Namco Bandai Games, who has been a great help to me since the middle of .hack, said to me at the time, G.U. is too maniacal, it has a strong message, it is deep and elaborate, and it is too much fun. The strong, deep, and elaborate message accelerated the mania level. Existing fans supported it, but the depth of the work made it difficult for new users to get involved. That is true, and I don’t mean to say that it is wrong since that was the concept behind the creation of G.U. in the first place.

Niizato: I know that I made the music more aggressive than I intended, so I guess I was right in line with my goal.

Matsuyama: Yes. The first game in the .hack series started with the idea of working with Bandai to create a new “Royal Road,” a standard RPG, a major title that would carry the company for the next ten years. The storyline and main character had a Royal Road feel. However, what we decided to do when we started planning G.U. was to create a character that would make people want to draw fanzines at Comiket or Cosplay, and that would make people love the character deeply. With this in mind, I designed unique characters and dared to push the details of the settings. (See The memo of 20.000 words by Hiroshi Matsuyama in .hack//Archive 02 -G.U.- BLACK & WHITE)

Niizato: Somehow, the president and I created work that concentrated our interests—a work that was chuunibyou within chuunibyou. That was G.U. The message was more potent because of that concentration, and I was able to achieve my original goal. However, as you pointed out then, the target audience became narrower as the world became more intense and the story more profound.

Matsuyama: Looking at the user base that played the .hack series, the main character, Kite, was 14 years old, so the user base for the series was around 14 years old. Interestingly, the user base for G.U., released three years later, was more like 17 to 18 years old. This means that the users of .hack were playing G.U. as they were, aged 3 to 4 years together with the game. Incidentally, Haseo, the main character in G.U., is 17 years old, which aligns with the user demographic.

Niizato: So it was right for a sequel. It’s appealing correctly to the former fans.

Matsuyama: Yes, I was right. However, “.hack” cannot continue growing older and becoming more adult-oriented. So, the third season project has two goals: First, to bring back the “Royal Road” feel of shonen manga, and second, to make the manga less maniacal and “too much” for adults. The second was to rejuvenate the user base, making it a work that junior high and high school students could enjoy. Based on these orders, we decided to make a new “.hack” that could be played on a portable game console.

Niizato: Regarding mania, you also mentioned the vast amount of .hack-related work created up to that point. The content of manga, anime, and novels had become so abundant that there was a concern that people might not be able to enjoy .hack if they had not read “A.” I think that was the beginning of the problem.

Matsuyama: However, these past works are also an asset. Furthermore, the characters from past works, such as Haseo from G.U., were prevalent and well-received by users. Ultimately, we concluded that even if people started with Link as an entry point, we should be able to create something that covered the appeal of .hack, G.U., and all the manga, novels, and other works developed from various perspectives.

Niizato: In other words, we needed something that would appeal to both new customers and old fans, which was more challenging than it sounds. It was a complicated order. At first, I had yet to learn how to approach the creation of a new work, and to be honest, I was confused. As I mentioned earlier if I made a new work based on the assumption that people knew the story of each of the previous “.hack” works, there would be too many things that had been accumulated, and the more new works I made, the more maniacal they would become. The vast history and body of work from the past have become a weak point here. When we first came up with the idea for this project, we had the bold idea of creating an original story in which the characters from each work would appear in a parallel world, and the story would go back and forth between them.

Matsuyama: Didn’t you know how to make it into a simulation RPG?

Niizato: Yes, the past characters were prevalent among fans, and there was talk of utilizing those character assets as units.

Matsuyama: In the end, I thought a simulation RPG would be too radical. We returned to the idea of keeping the action RPG feel, where you control and move the characters yourself.

Niizato: That’s right. From there, we came up with a lot of ideas. How about an action RPG with a male and female twin as the main characters, where you use both characters to progress through the game?

Niizato: As for the scenario, through repeated discussions, we concluded that it would be an omnibus story that would encompass all the .hack works up to this point. The history and works of the past…the stories of the heroes are experienced through the new protagonist, Tokio Kuryuu, who eventually grows up to be a hero.

I had a hard time with the scenario.

Matsuyama: As long as it is an RPG, drama is essential and the top priority. Furthermore, since it is a “.hack” game, no one wants to have a random setting, and if the setting and technology are not realistic, the game will wake up from its dream and become uninteresting. We needed to create a scenario that would serve multiple purposes: to allow the audience to experience the story of the past protagonists and to allow Tokio’s own story to progress at the same time while taking care to avoid this. I was thinking of a simple time-travel story. Still, it didn’t seem like .hack. The time travel itself seemed ridiculous, so I came up with the “dive into server log data” scenario. By diving into the log data at the time of the incidents that occurred in The World in the past, the main idea of getting involved in the incidents that happened in each work was established.

Niizato: Then the next question is, who is the first character from the past that Tokio meets? Then I started to think about who the first character from the past that Tokio met was. Regarding the timeline, Tsukasa from .hack//SIGN (SIGN) is the first main character, but the symbolic main character would be Kite. At the beginning of the .hack story, Kite is just an ordinary junior high school student and an ordinary player, but by the end of the series, he has become a “hero,” and that growth is fascinating. I wanted the Hero of the new story to meet the grown-up Kite the Knight Hero at the beginning. When I decided to place Kite as the Hero, I gradually concluded that the new protagonist should be a boy who admires Kite. He was 14 years old, the same age as Kite. An incomplete and immature boy. Resulting in the creation of Tokio Kuryuu.

Matsuyama: From there, original characters such as Saika and Schicksal emerged, and the story of Link slowly began to take shape. The relationship between Tokio’s case and the cases in the past also began to build up gradually.

Niizato: We managed to start working on the scenario, but we had to renew each of the past stories, and then we had to work hard to combine each of them to make the stories fit together. This time, Sano Masayuki, our staff member, was in charge of the writing scenario, and he scraped the life out of it… He played, watched, and read all the .hack games. As he conceived and re-edited the scenario, he became the most knowledgeable person in our company about the series in general.

Matsuyama: However, the finished script was, well, long and drawn out. The scenario was too long, which could have been more surprising since it contained much information. But if we had cut it down, it would have been too wordy, and the meaning would have been lost. So, I supplemented it with an e-mail system unique to .hack.

Niizato: Sano, who wrote the script, struggled because Link was his first job as a leading game writer. Unlike novels, game scenarios require short sentences, effective use of dialogue, and other such tricks. I couldn’t do that from the beginning, so I had to do a lot of redrafting… I had a lot of trouble with the scenario (laughs).

Matsuyama: The scenario length was two to three times longer than initially envisioned, which was more than I expected.

Kikuya Megane and Seiichiro Hosokawa

Matsuyama: Along with the scenario, we are also refining the artwork at the same time, and this is where Kikuya Megane, who did the artwork for this project, comes in. I have known Kikuya Megane-sensei since her manga works for .hack//XXXX (2 volumes), which was serialized from 2006 to 2007, and she has a good understanding of my work. We also asked her to include the work of the manga version, which had already been planned. As a result, she was deeply involved in the development of the game and was a very important figure in the creation of the characters and direction.

Niizato: Since we were aiming for something that a wide range of people could accept, we thought that Seiichiro Hosokawa‘s drawings would be too aggressive. We discussed who we should ask, and Kikuya-sensei, who has Yoshiyuki Sadamoto‘s design lineage, would be the best person to do the main artwork. We decided to have Kikuya-sensei draw the main artwork, and Seiichiro Hosokawa was in charge of refining the original character design. Still, I guess Hosokawa is not good at drawing simple pictures with few lines, so no matter how many times he refines the design, there are still many lines (laughs). (Laughs.) When I handed Hosokawa’s design to Kikuya-sensei, she would often say, “There are still too many lines!” I usually had to tell him, “There are still too many lines! Especially…Haseo (laughs).”

Matsuyama: The number of belts wrapped around Haseo’s body hasn’t decreased at all (laughs). No matter how many times we refined the design around his neck, it was still covered with countless belts. Well, that is one of the characteristics of Hosokawa’s designs, but in the end, there was only one belt. Also, Hosokawa’s designs are so distinctive that when I drew them with other designs, I would think, “What’s wrong with the balance? Is there something unbalanced? Is it different from the design? It’s different from the design”. Kikuya-sensei had a hard time with that. So, I asked Kikuya-sensei to refine Hosokawa’s design, and then she refined it further to complete the final design.

Niizato: Link features all the characters from the past, and since the game, manga, and anime are mixed, we had to unify the design tastes of all the characters. This refinement was necessary for that reason. There was also the opposite pattern of “simplifying.”

Matsuyama: Yes, anime characters. For example, if you mix the anime character Tsukasa with the game characters as they are, one of them would look plainly dressed. So, the decoration in Link has been increased to make it more luxurious. The reason for the refinement was also a problem with the PSP’s graphics specs. And so, in the end, we had to redesign all the characters, prepare Xth form designs for each character, and restructure the scenario to make it consistent…the most thorny path to take, I guess.

Niizato: The original concept was to use the existing assets, but when we realized that, instead of using them, we renewed all of them, which increased the amount of work. But it was worth it because we were able to create fresh artwork that is unique to Link.

Demonstration of a unique expression in .hack//Link

Niizato: Another area where Kikuya-sensei was heavily involved was in drawing the comic demo. Early on, we decided that we would not do a simple polygonal puppet show (demo) for the PSP, so we decided to use 2D drawings. We didn’t want to do it in 3D, but we also didn’t want to make it an event scene with only 2D standing pictures talking. When we were trying to figure out how to make the expression richer, the digital comic techniques that were becoming popular at the time were quite helpful.

Matsuyama: One reason we didn’t use 3D was that the PSP has polygonal joint limitations and resolution issues, so moving polygons could make the screen look cheap.

Niizato: To express the aforementioned huge scenario in a comic demo, Kikuya-sensei also created an enormous number of original drawings. Unlike the conversation demo scenes, where only a few patterns of standing pictures were prepared and displayed in different ways, all the images were drawn by Kikuya-sensei himself. Kikuya-sensei and the CC2 staff who were in charge of coloring also had a heavy workload.

Matsuyama: Kikuya-sensei is in charge of the original drawings for the comic demo, and when he converted the original drawings he received into data, he did the coloring with CC2. Even though the layout was in comic format, it had a solid anime-expressive image, so I had him unify the finish with a lot of so-called anime-like post-processing. Rather than a single picture or frame, I tried to create an image of a film comic cut out of a scene from an animated film. If a film comic is made by cutting out frames (still images) from an animated movie, this method is the complete opposite, drawing a picture from scratch that reminds one of an animated movie… As you can imagine, this is very labor intensive (laughs).

Niizato: I added movements and effects to the frames. At first, I was groping my way around, but I found a lot of references in Bishoujo games on PCs. These games were the first to adopt the expression technique of moving manga-like 2D pictures. I used them as references while seeking an animated comic demo that would be unique to Link.

Matsuyama: The technique we tried in the comic demo, where illustrations are processed in post-processing to create an anime-like effect. The staff who made this technique were later assigned to the Naruto: Ultimate Ninja series development team and began working on high-end animation for the PS3. Their experience with the comic demo was a big help. The comic demo was a lot of work, but it was very beneficial from CC2’s point of view. There isn’t any other 2D illustration for games where so much effort is put into the animation process for each frame.

Niizato: Since the event scenes were to be expressed in comic form, I discussed the direction and storyline with Kikuya-sensei on many occasions. I was also serializing .hack//Link: Twilight Knights in “Monthly Kerokero Ace Magazine” at the same time, and we had meetings for this manga once a month, but I had entrusted most of the original elements of .hack//Link: Twilight Knights to Kikuya-sensei, so great that I had a lot of trust in her.

Matsuyama: Of course, Shinri was also involved in the creation of the serialized comic story, but Kikuya-sensei was a big part of that. You should ask a manga professional about manga, and as time went on, there were no more and more areas that CC2 had to ask for correction. Toward the end, there were so many one-shot OKs that Kikuya-sensei said, “Didn’t I do most of the drawings by myself? (laughs).

Niizato: So it was indeed a trustworthy and trustworthy member of the staff. Actually, because of our daily interactions, we received feedback on how the ending of the game should be developed. We had a storyline that we had already given them, but they said it wasn’t enough. Since she was in charge of the comic demo, she had a deep understanding of the scenario, including each frame and each line of dialogue. Sometimes, I would ask for suggestions because I wasn’t satisfied with them, and I would adopt the direction or lines that Kikuya-sensei gave me. For the ending part, we worked out the detailed image with Kikuya-sensei and came up with that shape. Thanks to him, I think we came up with a better version.

Reunion with the past VAs

Niizato: Another memorable part of the game was the post-recording. Link is a game in which all the prominent members of the past .hack games appear in one game, and it is fully voiced. In order to achieve this tremendous volume of work, it took an enormous amount of time to record the post-recording. There were about 100 voice actors, and the number of people involved was quite large. It took almost half a year to record the post-recording. During the core period, I was away from the office for about two months and stuck in the recording studio. For the new voice actors who were working on Link, such as Yuko Sanpei as Tokio, we only had to give them instructions on how they should act in accordance with the new scenario. Still, the voice actors who had appeared in our previous works, such as SIGN and .hack, were all gathered together. Then, the female voice actors who were teenage girls when we recorded the work about ten years ago became adults by the time of the post-recording for Link. In this case, the voice quality had changed, and it was sometimes difficult to reproduce the voice of that time.

Matsuyama: This is inevitably the case with works that have a long history. Of course, the voice actors age along with the production. But they are still professionals and do their best.

Niizato: Also, many people take a long time to remember what kind of role “XX” plays. (Laughs) So we would show them videos of anime or games in which they had previously appeared so they could remember what they were doing back then. I would play videos of anime and video games that I had appeared in before and ask them to remember those times as they played the character. I had them recall their instincts. It was a lot of work, but it was like a reunion with all the voice actors from the past. During the post-recording, I felt the history of .hack, which has been built over the years. I strongly feel that many people have been involved in this work.

The future of the .hack series

Matsuyama: With the movie .hack//Sekai no Mukou Ni and the PS3 Game .hack//Versus the 3rd season project is over for now, and the latest “.hack” related title as of 2013 is Guilty Dragon: Sin Dragon and the Eight Curses (Guildra) depicts events in the year 2030, which would be marked at the very end of the .hack timeline, but because it is a smartphone title, the name .hack is not that visible. At events, we are often asked by customers if they would like to play the new title on a console, but let’s say, for example, that they would like to play. If we were asked to make .hack for a console from now on, we would have a clear vision. We would like to take .hack apart again and see where we can compete. If we are asked whether we want to go broad or maniacal, this time, we would like to make a profound and dense work in a different direction from our past works.

Niizato: I think so, too. Although the series has been going on for more than ten years, there is still a lot of potential for expression that only .hack can offer. I am not tired of it. I answered that I was not bored at all. Personally, however, I don’t think I want to do the “entering the network” thing anymore…. It’s not that I don’t want to do it; it’s just that I feel like I’ve already done it. It’s challenging to convey this, but in the past, “networks” and “computers” were a different world from the one I am in now, a technology that I admired, unknown, and at the same time, mysterious and scary. It was a distant existence. It was a different world. I think it was because of this image that I was able to express it, but today, in 2013, technology is much more familiar and integrated into the world. Even the word “ubiquitous” has become so commonplace that we are tired of hearing it. I don’t think it is the right time to focus on something that is already a part of our daily lives. In other words, we are already part of the network. In a sense, I think the world we are living in is the network world itself. When you think about it, I believe there are ways of expressing .hack that are possible only now.

Matsuyama: For example, I don’t think I’m thinking of doing another one involving heroes from the past, such as Kite or Haseo. If I do, the next one will be a new story with entirely new characters. I want to be prepared to draw from a blank sheet of paper. It doesn’t seem that .hack has any rules or restrictions, but rather, it allows for free expression. Of course, some keywords are common to the worldview, such as The World, but what I am envisioning now is not a “defensive” image at all. I am not imagining anything at this point, but I hope that one day, I will be able to do so. Even if it is just a fantasy at this point, I want to be able to start working on it as soon as the day comes when I can actually give it shape. With your support, .hack has the potential to expand even further, so we must be fully prepared to keep that potential alive.

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