Super Mario Odyssey is mere hours away from launching in the states and Europe. While you wait a little longer, you can keep yourself busy with this Verge interview featuring Nintendo's Yoshiaki Koizumi. Mr. Koizumi has a lot to say about story in Mario games, Miyamoto's involvement in Odyssey, and if there could be a sequel to Odyssey on Switch.
V: Through your involvement with the Super Mario series, you’ve often been responsible for the story elements, like the storybook sequences in Super Mario Galaxy. Odyssey is a big departure in terms of theme and tone, so I’m curious about your thoughts on continuity and story and the role they play in the series.
YK: I think the basis for all of the story in the Super Mario series goes back to the original Super Mario Bros., and that basic set up of Princess Peach being kidnapped by Bowser and Mario having to go and try to save her. And I think it's because it had that emotional resonance of giving players greater motivation to actually go and try to complete the game. And in every new game having the difficulty or struggle that has to be overcome was solved in terms of creating a story.
So an example of that would be Super Mario Galaxy. Taking Mario out of his regular world and putting him in space would be something that, if done without enough context, could have confused players and made people think. “Why is this happening?” So creating the story and the context for that change in setting was a very important part of developing that game. The story allows for the kind of gravity-defying play which was unique to Super Mario Galaxy.
I don’t think of story as being the central focus of Super Mario games, but the two important roles that it plays are firstly providing a motivation and an emotional driving factor for the player to play the game and complete it. And secondly, to provide context for the game mechanics and the actions that are contained within the game. I think that players create their own story in a video game and so it's not necessarily for the creator to map that out.
V: Can you speak about Shigeru Miyamoto’s involvement in this game? Do you have to sign off with him on things like adding a T-rex to the game, as the creator of Mario?
YK: The involvement of Mr. Miyamoto in this project is pretty similar to previous projects as well, in that we will go to him and say “this is the kind of game we want to make, this is what we're hoping to achieve,” and he will look at it and give his feedback and advice and ideas. In terms of actually how much of his advice we take on, we have a degree of flexibility and a degree of autonomy. And for Super Mario Odyssey, actually I'd say he left us to our own devices quite a lot.
V: Super Mario Odyssey is coming out pretty early in the Switch’s lifecycle. Normally there’s only one 3D Mario game per system, and Super Mario Galaxy was the only one to get a direct sequel. What are the chances of another game for the Switch — would you rather iterate on this idea, or would you want to do something completely new?
YK: I'm obviously considering lots of things for the future. In terms of Super Mario Odyssey and whether there would be a sequel, the first game hasn't even come out yet so it's very tough to say at this stage whether there would be a sequel or not. I'm first and foremost just hoping that Super Mario Odyssey is a success. And secondly, yeah, with the Nintendo Switch lifecycle again it's very early — who knows how things will turn out? As you say, in the past maybe there's been one 3D title per hardware generation on average, but I wouldn't say that that's a hard-and-fast rule that would have to be adhered to.
from GoNintendo
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