One important point that Mr. Kobayashi discussed involved Nero and Dante. According to Kobayashi, Capcom really wanted to have a scenario for Devil May Cry 4 that involved both a succession and a fresh start, hence the senior-junior relationship between Dante and Nero. Interestingly, Kobayashi and the rest of the Devil May Cry 4 development team at Capcom drew from various sources of inspiration for the "old hero, new hero" scenario - among them the Dragon Ball and Gundam series.

The first and the third Devil May Cry games were the best received in the series, and a lot of people particularly like the third one. What did you want to achieve with Devil May Cry 4?

One of the first things that we decided when we were just planning out the game was that we would definitely have a new main character in the game. We definitely wanted to have a new hero. We also wanted to have this kind of like, changing of the baton or passing the torch; that you would be able to switch between between Dante and Nero in the game. So how to be able to do that in the game and how to be able to do that in the story was something that we had to think quite a lot about.

Was the reasoning behind having Nero as a new character primarily story reasons or for gameplay reasons primarily?

Primarily it was for gameplay reasons. I mean, in [Devil May Cry] one, two and three, Dante got more and more moves. It was getting more and more complicated and it became a little bit difficult for people who had never played the series before to be able to control him. So in order to be able to attract both new fans and people who were fans of the series already; so they would both be at the same starting point and both be able to enjoy the game, we felt we had to change and have a new main character

But this is going to be the first game done for using this engine on PlayStation 3. What were the technical challenges involved to get this technology up and running on PS3? How does it compare to Xbox 360?

It's not a 360 engine. It's not an engine for the 360. It's the internal engine that we use at Capcom for next generation machines called the MT Framework [note: MT stands for multi-target]. That actually runs on PC. As you know, we did originally plan to have this title just on PS3, but actually the development was done on a PC, not on a particular console. So because it's all done on the PC--as were the other two titles that you mentioned--it makes it very easy to move it put it on the 360 and use the power of that machine, or to put it on the PS3 and use the power of that machine, each in different ways. It's really pretty easy to do it, developing it from this PC base.

Final Blade via blog.newsweek.com »