Sunaka Marién
Well-known Member
Ok guys, I *finally* got myself to finish that transkript of the DVD that came with the limited French version of Devil May Cry - A Divine Comedy by Pix'n love Editions.
It's basically an interview with Ninja Theory's Nina Kirstensen, Tameem Antoinaides and Alessandro 'Talexi' Taini. They're talking a bit about the studio itself and, of course, the making of and inspirations for DmC.
Before you start reading, please note that I am not a native speaker, which made it difficult for me to understand some of the things they said, especially with Taini, since he's got a pretty strong accent. There are some instances in which I had no clue what exactly they said, but that's quite cleary marked, I think (if someone has an idea as to what they say there, it'd be very much appreciated if you'd tell me). I also left most of what was said unchanged, like, I didn't correct grammatical mistakes they made while talking and stuff like that, because I feared I might accidentially change the meaning.
M'k, here we go!
Nina: *somethingsomething*Kung Gu Chaos was our first original IP, it was all about combat, that was a 4-player multiplayer game. It was about characters and cinematography and things like that, so it *somethingsomething* genesis of the things that we are now quite well know for, were all there in that very first game which we ultimately signed to Microsoft.
Tameem: So, like, Kung Fu Chaos was based on Hong-Kong movies, which I love. Jackie Chan films and other films around there which I loved at that time. And it's because of the action, the action was just so much faster, err, creative than Hollywood movies.
Nina: And then we decided that we're gonna put - you know, make our mark on the world, you know, do the big bad next big thing, so we decided that we would do a next-gen game and that was when we decided to make Heavenly Sword. So that was our second original IP, building on combat, cinematography, story telling and that sort of thing. That was a long development on that game, ehm, that it came out in 2007.
Tameem: Kung Fu Chaos was cool but it was - what it was, was a small game and we wanted to playing with the big boys. Heavenly Sword was based on, again, a lot of chinese and asian movies, like Crouching Tiger. It has got that mystical, visually stunning with very cool action feel about it, so we wanted to follow that.
Talexi: As soon as I had the chance to, you know, head into here with Ninja, and I saw the, all the really cool cinematic projects they were doing, was an very early stage of Heavenly Sword, I was like wow, these were
playing/creating/claiming?(not sure what he says here) a movie! I didn't have much experience in games, that was somehow a good thing for them, because I could give something more original. My, always my reference are movies, or comics or stuff total different and, I think video games is not only images are now, you like you, you need to catch the imagination of people, we're doing something in Ninja, we try to show them something they haven't seen before, and so that's why we like a lot to push the colors to make dreamy moment. Now games tend to do things very, eehm, monochromatic, and especially the war one. The approche is totally differente, it's like fantasy more realistic. We like fantasy and so we try to push that side more we can.
Nina: Then our next big thing was both, would now be first party with Micorsoft and then first party with Sony. We need to go across platform, because we, you know, we're not making money by doing just one platform, so we should do lots of platforms. So we came up with our third original Ip, which was Enslaved. We signed that to Namco. And again that built on combat, storytelling, cinematography and so forth and went cross-platform with that.
Tameem: Enslaved was a bit of a weird one, because it's not really asian, but it's based on an asian story. Mainly it is the story I liked, that wasn't really the fact that it was asian, it was just, uh, the strange story. It's like a myth, like Lord of the Rings, but from a different culture, and I thought that was really attractive. But now so much, it's like all asian action has now gone into Hollywood and become part of Hollywood, so it's become mainstream, and I think at some level I wanna go slightly away from what Hollywood does. I think it's a problem, but then also a good thing.
Nina: And while that was in develpment, we were harraged(???) by Capcom. We'd never worked on someone else's IP before, BUT the fit(?) was great, you know, we knew that when we went back and had a company meeting with the team and then guess what, we're gonna make the next Devil May Cry and we're gonna be like "awsome!",so, you know? And the fit was right for us and so, we said yes.
Tameem: So when Capcom approched us and said we'd really like to work with you guys on Devil May Cry we were shocked, you know we were surprised as much as anyone. We didn't understand really why they would come to us.
Talexi: I was imagine myself doing the previous one, which is not my style. It's very Manga, very, kind of, Japanese, and I'm not. I like when I create, we create our characters, our style, ours, and I was like, phew,
that's not gonna be creative.
Tameem: So we met them, and they said, what they really wanna do is kind of create another interpretation of Devil May Cry, and that if they did it themselves, they would have basically the same interpretation. They kind of made a little bit more sense.
Talexi: As soon as they said that I was much more happy and much more exiting because that meant that we can put our - it's an interpretation, of what you think is that game. It's like Batman, the comics Batman Black and White, you see different artists everywhere in the world, they do Batman, but even Otomo did Batman, even Moebius. You see totally different ones from the others, so we did our interpretation of DMC.
Nina: They chose us because they liked our artistic style; they thought that we could bring something new artistically, our production values aswell, we've been conver(?) ground breaking studio in some areas for quite some time, for example performance capture which, now everyone does performance capture, but we were the first people ever to do real performance capture. We went out to Weta in Newzealand where the shot Lord of the Rings originally with Andy Serkins. We got him on Heavenly Sword. He'd just come off Lord of the Rings, and was interested in the video games and what it coul do, you know, what that medium meant to him. And he hooked us up with Weta in Newzealand so we went and shot out with them, and so that's actually the first time a real performance capture shoot ever happened. When Andy shot Gollum they only captured the body. When he shot King Kong after that, they captured body and they captured face seperately, because they didn't have the technology, and voice seperate, that aswell, and the first time they actually captured all three was for us and Heavenly Sword. So we sent out our technical people out
there to work with Weta. Adn we shot five people again which had never ever been done in the world ever, and I think Capcom valued that immensely because they knew that we would make that commitment to the best possible production value. And, we had combat experience. You know in the west, not very many developers have, so they thought that we could take on combat and raise it to the level that's needed for a game like Devil May Cry.
Tameem: Actually, Devil May Cry 1 I was, it's like it's burned into my brain because that was the first game I saw when I was a programmer. I thought that's the kinda game we should be making, like, that's what everything I love about action cinema and music and everything is put into that game. That's also kind of dangerous because we do that, and then the first thing you wanna do is make Devil May Cry 5 and that's not. For us it became clear that - because the game is all in different orders, chronologically - and every game leaves open questions, that to fill those holes for us would I think it would have just very restricted what we could have done with it so,it was very clear to us that we have to re-imagine it and start again. Like, if you want to get people to buy into this game for the first time you can't expect them to know, go through all of that story threads and playing the games out of order over ten years, so, it was clear that it had to be an originstory of Dante, and now let's start form the beginning and think about who he is and what events shape his life, as a character what things did he go through, and we did dozens of dozens of sketches, none of them had white hair or a red coat, none of them, none of them had swords and guns either, they were just sketches of different moments in his life, like the first time he runs away, kind of like him as a teenager, just different situations in his life. Once we did that, once we stopped trying to design a costume, a costume hero, and we started to desing a person.
Talexi: We wanted a guy that was really like the guys now you got everywhere and we know that Dante - the original Dante - is not really(?) like that so.. but we wanted to give a reason why it's like that, maybe because in the past he's been involved in different things so.. and so we've been looking at movies more like about the attitude of the guys like Fight Club where, you know the really, they're just normal people but when you see them they're dressing normally and they really strong they do wierd stuff ehmeh, from the eyes, the look, you can tell they can be really strong and ah, and bad and not concentrate too much on the costume, the fancy costume. You know cause these would not wear what we were looking at. Where often says (???), do you imagine in any movies even Batman Begins or something, stuff like that, in a realistic movie to see a normal guy with the sword, going in a pub, or in a club, so the sword has to appear only in a place where it got sense, and this is why we create Limbo, which is an alternative reallity where there it become really fantasy and that
you are the only person, there isn't anyone else. Cuz we like giving reasons, why the sword is just there without any support, we came up with the idea of what if he's got a tattoo, where, like his father gave it, like brand him, like give him like a power something that you now from there that the source of power he's got which is would be in the back, because the sword appear always there. So that was the reason why the tattoo and we tried to connect the person with the sword. We have some movies, for example in Dexter. I like the moment when he's a child and he sees his mom die, and there is all the blood everywhere and from, because he was child he smelled the blood and stuff so that's why it's become like a crazy(?) for blood. We try, in the first, really first concept Dante had a white patch here *shows with his hand* you know white. I thought maybe when he was child he saw his mom killed, like people are shocked and they got a patch, yeah, maybe that one could be a sign of demoniac side of him something like that? Like, so give a reason why the white hair appear. That makes a more interesting story and more interesting things and little more ingame, little more story, more you know, really really Demon Trigger, the white does appeaper completely and so that we felt was really interesting.
Tameem: It was kind of an opportunity to grab this, and make it, um, our own. I think that's the only way to reimagine a franchise - whether it's music or film, or whatever - if it's just copy what was done before, it never moves on, it never changes, and I think where franchises have evolved it has been because there's been a successfull reinterpretation that's a bit unexpected.
The story was really about two brothers, the trust that slowly builds with them, and the reasons why they will, that trust is broken, and it's broken because of a human character Kat. So really it's a story of Dante's total rejection of humanity and being indipendent, change into someone who's actually trusts his brother, but because of this, because of the way his brother treats humanity and Kat.
One of our actors said this is a shakespearian, I whish she didn't say that, because now we've got lots of jokes about this is, "this is not Shakespear!". Yeah, I know it's not supposed to be Sheakespear, but it's uhm, *nods*, I thinks it's a simple story really. It's a simple story about.. a origin story of a guy who learns to trust.
At the same time, you know, there is some people that are complaining that there is too much cutscenes in. I don't think there is because they're all skippable, anyway, but I think it was really, important to just focus on Dante and not try and make it too complicated story about lots of other characters, at least in this game, in an origin, I think you should just stay on one character and keep it simple. I think a simple story told well is better than a complicated story told badly.
Talexi: I rally like, personally, mix Japanese-style with European. Even in comics or even in cartoons. Like for example Miyazaki; to me is a mix because often I can see influence of Moebius. And you can tell the design ready around(?) the creature in Mononoke and Princess and the God is really Moebius. When I see those together it's like "Wow", so I think we been doing this exactly same for Enslaved, for example, because it's the forest, in Enslaved is really like in Mononoke. A forest when I go there is god work is like whoa, the colors the blue and the green. Same thing in DmC. We had a really co-reference for the color, the landsflare, always in Manga-Anime, they push a lot the landsflare on top of everything like just to create a gradience of colors and I love that. In game we got real grafiti artist, but in that case [the picture of Sparda and Eva kissing], we made the grafit, me and Daniel Baker, our senior concept artist. *somethingsomething* was like telling because it's urban. We rally wanna bring this urban feeling of the city. So the best way was like tell the story through a graffiti. There is some, in the first moment we wanted to animate those graffiti, but it was really too complicated. But I think the, what we managed to do with the camera state on the graffiti, and the graffiti, like, glow a little bit, like, you know the old Egypt art, they telling story about the past? We tried to do exactly the same but in graffit. So go alrady there, you see is not peering(?) in the graffiti, they/stay(?) there like in the city, the city already people being talking about the past *magic hands~*.
Tameem really wanted to do, like to really push allways this urban graffiti love like Beriln, Banksy, stuff like. What I really wanted is like not have only one style of graffiti but have like different one, like Banksy, like more illustrate more this and that mixing toghether. So, like when you see a wall of graffiti usually a really mess, there's one and then one on top *makes hand gestures*, and then maybe a sticker *hand gesture*. Tameem bring us a lot of picture from Berlin is really cool so I said imagine if you can tell a story in that walls.
Tameem: Ah well, how we got there. Like first we thought about, what we wanna base this game and the concept rebellion is the most imp-, I think is the thing that we thought Dante should be about - his sword is called rebellion, so what is rebellion now, how do we see rebellion around us. If you have rebellion, you have to rebell against something meaningful. So we look at the world around us, we look at where rebellion is happening. It's happening on the internet, you know using social media. Anonymous, Wikileaks, Pussy Riot and Banksy.. like these all artistic, you know including artistic forms of rebellion, and they're all rebelling against what they precieve as evil. So I said let's take that stuff further. Instead of demons being guys with horns and scary eyes, which is not scary to anyone, let's make them scary in a different way, closer to us. So then we reached the world of satire, which we had back in Kung Fu Chaos, y'know, Kung Fu Chaos was like a joke on hollywood movies, and this, this is like a satire on society. And I thought that's a good thing to.. you know some like my favorite stuff like Day of the Dead was a satire. So I thought there is a fun opportunity there to say "Well what if those guys, that look like they're clearly mad on TV, or clearly evil, are actually demons?". I would say it's not a political leaning, it is not a political party behind. It's about rebellion against evil in all it's forms. Like in the game evil, it's very in-your-face, it's really, like I see it as, it's not a serious commentry, if it was serious it would be more like 1984. This is more brash, it's like really it's more of a cartoon of our world. It's a John Carpenter film, where the aliens control society, but you can only see them if you put glasses on. So this was just an idea when we thought, early on we thought "How do we make it contemporary and have demons walking down the street?" it's like, it doesn't work. The demons have to be hidden, and then, so how do we hide the demons? Okay, maybe a paralle dimension? Dante has devilblood in him so he can see it. And then it was clear like they lived in something very similar to that, the aliens control society, you put the glasses on and you see the messages. So, it was a rally cool kind of concept, that was a good idea in there and those ideas are perfect for now. Cause it's also like a lot of streetart, you know streetart with the OBEY and stuff, I think it all goes back to that film. That's what DmC wanted, for me, to, all kinds of things that I loved, like action cinema Matrix, Yuen Woo-ping, action choréography, Pulp Fiction, gunplay or Chow Yun-Fat style gunplay, and mixed it all up with rock music. That was to me the essence of Devil May Cry, bring together all kinds of cool forms of culture into a video game. So, we thought let's take that approche, while then, how can we copy Devil May Cry's combat, rock music, you know, bit-by-bit, it was like what's the music of now? What's the culutre of now? What are the heroes of now? What are the themes of now? What are the stories of now?
Telexi: At Ninja we tried to, we got talents, people in many area, we tried to do something that make everyone happy. like not only have music for background, but actually be part of the gameplay. For the club, I went to see the Pink Floyd concert. And I was shok-amazed by the projection 3D on the wall. Which the wall, would actually look like destroyed, and that's like amazing because it looked like the recreate exactly the building where the wall project. That's amazing, I though about what if we got inside of that instead of whatching. That was the idea I tried to being inside of, like it's very, very surralistic as the game, but more club look. There are many cities one is my home city(?), which is very similar to Barcellona, we got, I really like Barcellona, the fact we got that Gaudí quarter and urban place, you got even, you know a lot. I like city where it changes styles from modern you can go even Paris, you got amazing buildings and historical but you got the that area really modern that square buildings is really cool, so why not make a city, create a city where it's got exactly everything like that? I like mix styles because if you do everything completely gothic; there's manny games out of there, and many, it's a bit too classic only put gothics. But in the same time I love even as New York a shilouette, like the very long towers. Sometimes we try to stretched, those buildings we tried to do use european bulidings but by duplicate the same buildings like three-four times and make it even taller, just to have a feeling of New York like make big, big, big city like. As soon as I knew could be a bit more far fantasy, like Limbo, really like uhm, surrealistic paintings, where, like, in surrealistic paintings you've still got realistic objects, like old buildings, but like floating, cracking and like melting like Dalí's things like 'wow!'. And what I like it from surralism was to take every day we got in our life and interpret it in a different way, in a dreamy way, I like that aspect because is, our game, is like fantasy in some minor, it's got this fantasy area, it is very, it's not but it's got Limbo has to be specific has to be like fantasy I like that aspect of surrealism.
For sure what I personally like is usally gameplay goes horizontal but sometimes it's cool try to think about opposite way, so what about you go really really high and then go down. The Limbo give us the chance actually to twist the completely upside down. And just straight away I varied like deisgn which design people which got different way of thinking. "Yes but why can you go there?" I said, "Ah, well, I dunno.". We start with animate, oh how cool is that? When they think about "Oh wait, just a second maybe we can actually use that for gameplay" so is in the end more than the other games we done before we being really much more in talking in contact in sharing ideas.
Tameem: The best thing, I think actually, abaout working on this game was the people that came up. In a way I'm the face of DmC, like from a development point of view for all the stuff, all the **** comes to me - which is good. But the guys on the team, people like Rahni [Tucker], she's our combat designer. So there is a woman in games
, doing very much of combat system. She's basically created the whole system on her own, single handedly. Capcom, when the built their combat engine, they had about 5-6 combat designers and it's amazing that she's just managed to on her own. And in other areas of the game, all these guys were just really stepped-up in a way I've not seen people do. So it's been really good, really refreshing for me that actually my job has changed from being creative dictator to more like creative helper of peoople. So that's, yeah, it's been really cool.
Talexi: I'm really proud that we rebooted something really, really famous, something really well-known, and it was a really big challange for us. And I think we, I'm proud if we stop with our area(?) we really, it's what Capcom wanted, really 've done and go ahead with your idea. And we proud that we did that, until the end. And the result are that everyone apparently love it very much and really appreachiate it and we got a lot of really good reviews from people, usually are really not so nice kind with video games.
Nina: But when you actually read the reviews, that's the thing that's the strongest really, because that what they're sayin is that we've successfully made a reboot. The game is valued in and of itself, and it's true to the DNA of the franchise, so we've hit all the most important things for us. It makes us feel really proud and well we thought we did, we don't know for sure, I'm so the world judges you, so, yeah, we're looking to the future and as of now we're amitious. So our next move is gonna be another big amitious move!
It's basically an interview with Ninja Theory's Nina Kirstensen, Tameem Antoinaides and Alessandro 'Talexi' Taini. They're talking a bit about the studio itself and, of course, the making of and inspirations for DmC.
Before you start reading, please note that I am not a native speaker, which made it difficult for me to understand some of the things they said, especially with Taini, since he's got a pretty strong accent. There are some instances in which I had no clue what exactly they said, but that's quite cleary marked, I think (if someone has an idea as to what they say there, it'd be very much appreciated if you'd tell me). I also left most of what was said unchanged, like, I didn't correct grammatical mistakes they made while talking and stuff like that, because I feared I might accidentially change the meaning.
M'k, here we go!
Nina: *somethingsomething*Kung Gu Chaos was our first original IP, it was all about combat, that was a 4-player multiplayer game. It was about characters and cinematography and things like that, so it *somethingsomething* genesis of the things that we are now quite well know for, were all there in that very first game which we ultimately signed to Microsoft.
Tameem: So, like, Kung Fu Chaos was based on Hong-Kong movies, which I love. Jackie Chan films and other films around there which I loved at that time. And it's because of the action, the action was just so much faster, err, creative than Hollywood movies.
Nina: And then we decided that we're gonna put - you know, make our mark on the world, you know, do the big bad next big thing, so we decided that we would do a next-gen game and that was when we decided to make Heavenly Sword. So that was our second original IP, building on combat, cinematography, story telling and that sort of thing. That was a long development on that game, ehm, that it came out in 2007.
Tameem: Kung Fu Chaos was cool but it was - what it was, was a small game and we wanted to playing with the big boys. Heavenly Sword was based on, again, a lot of chinese and asian movies, like Crouching Tiger. It has got that mystical, visually stunning with very cool action feel about it, so we wanted to follow that.
Talexi: As soon as I had the chance to, you know, head into here with Ninja, and I saw the, all the really cool cinematic projects they were doing, was an very early stage of Heavenly Sword, I was like wow, these were
playing/creating/claiming?(not sure what he says here) a movie! I didn't have much experience in games, that was somehow a good thing for them, because I could give something more original. My, always my reference are movies, or comics or stuff total different and, I think video games is not only images are now, you like you, you need to catch the imagination of people, we're doing something in Ninja, we try to show them something they haven't seen before, and so that's why we like a lot to push the colors to make dreamy moment. Now games tend to do things very, eehm, monochromatic, and especially the war one. The approche is totally differente, it's like fantasy more realistic. We like fantasy and so we try to push that side more we can.
Nina: Then our next big thing was both, would now be first party with Micorsoft and then first party with Sony. We need to go across platform, because we, you know, we're not making money by doing just one platform, so we should do lots of platforms. So we came up with our third original Ip, which was Enslaved. We signed that to Namco. And again that built on combat, storytelling, cinematography and so forth and went cross-platform with that.
Tameem: Enslaved was a bit of a weird one, because it's not really asian, but it's based on an asian story. Mainly it is the story I liked, that wasn't really the fact that it was asian, it was just, uh, the strange story. It's like a myth, like Lord of the Rings, but from a different culture, and I thought that was really attractive. But now so much, it's like all asian action has now gone into Hollywood and become part of Hollywood, so it's become mainstream, and I think at some level I wanna go slightly away from what Hollywood does. I think it's a problem, but then also a good thing.
Nina: And while that was in develpment, we were harraged(???) by Capcom. We'd never worked on someone else's IP before, BUT the fit(?) was great, you know, we knew that when we went back and had a company meeting with the team and then guess what, we're gonna make the next Devil May Cry and we're gonna be like "awsome!",so, you know? And the fit was right for us and so, we said yes.
Tameem: So when Capcom approched us and said we'd really like to work with you guys on Devil May Cry we were shocked, you know we were surprised as much as anyone. We didn't understand really why they would come to us.
Talexi: I was imagine myself doing the previous one, which is not my style. It's very Manga, very, kind of, Japanese, and I'm not. I like when I create, we create our characters, our style, ours, and I was like, phew,
that's not gonna be creative.
Tameem: So we met them, and they said, what they really wanna do is kind of create another interpretation of Devil May Cry, and that if they did it themselves, they would have basically the same interpretation. They kind of made a little bit more sense.
Talexi: As soon as they said that I was much more happy and much more exiting because that meant that we can put our - it's an interpretation, of what you think is that game. It's like Batman, the comics Batman Black and White, you see different artists everywhere in the world, they do Batman, but even Otomo did Batman, even Moebius. You see totally different ones from the others, so we did our interpretation of DMC.
Nina: They chose us because they liked our artistic style; they thought that we could bring something new artistically, our production values aswell, we've been conver(?) ground breaking studio in some areas for quite some time, for example performance capture which, now everyone does performance capture, but we were the first people ever to do real performance capture. We went out to Weta in Newzealand where the shot Lord of the Rings originally with Andy Serkins. We got him on Heavenly Sword. He'd just come off Lord of the Rings, and was interested in the video games and what it coul do, you know, what that medium meant to him. And he hooked us up with Weta in Newzealand so we went and shot out with them, and so that's actually the first time a real performance capture shoot ever happened. When Andy shot Gollum they only captured the body. When he shot King Kong after that, they captured body and they captured face seperately, because they didn't have the technology, and voice seperate, that aswell, and the first time they actually captured all three was for us and Heavenly Sword. So we sent out our technical people out
there to work with Weta. Adn we shot five people again which had never ever been done in the world ever, and I think Capcom valued that immensely because they knew that we would make that commitment to the best possible production value. And, we had combat experience. You know in the west, not very many developers have, so they thought that we could take on combat and raise it to the level that's needed for a game like Devil May Cry.
Tameem: Actually, Devil May Cry 1 I was, it's like it's burned into my brain because that was the first game I saw when I was a programmer. I thought that's the kinda game we should be making, like, that's what everything I love about action cinema and music and everything is put into that game. That's also kind of dangerous because we do that, and then the first thing you wanna do is make Devil May Cry 5 and that's not. For us it became clear that - because the game is all in different orders, chronologically - and every game leaves open questions, that to fill those holes for us would I think it would have just very restricted what we could have done with it so,it was very clear to us that we have to re-imagine it and start again. Like, if you want to get people to buy into this game for the first time you can't expect them to know, go through all of that story threads and playing the games out of order over ten years, so, it was clear that it had to be an originstory of Dante, and now let's start form the beginning and think about who he is and what events shape his life, as a character what things did he go through, and we did dozens of dozens of sketches, none of them had white hair or a red coat, none of them, none of them had swords and guns either, they were just sketches of different moments in his life, like the first time he runs away, kind of like him as a teenager, just different situations in his life. Once we did that, once we stopped trying to design a costume, a costume hero, and we started to desing a person.
Talexi: We wanted a guy that was really like the guys now you got everywhere and we know that Dante - the original Dante - is not really(?) like that so.. but we wanted to give a reason why it's like that, maybe because in the past he's been involved in different things so.. and so we've been looking at movies more like about the attitude of the guys like Fight Club where, you know the really, they're just normal people but when you see them they're dressing normally and they really strong they do wierd stuff ehmeh, from the eyes, the look, you can tell they can be really strong and ah, and bad and not concentrate too much on the costume, the fancy costume. You know cause these would not wear what we were looking at. Where often says (???), do you imagine in any movies even Batman Begins or something, stuff like that, in a realistic movie to see a normal guy with the sword, going in a pub, or in a club, so the sword has to appear only in a place where it got sense, and this is why we create Limbo, which is an alternative reallity where there it become really fantasy and that
you are the only person, there isn't anyone else. Cuz we like giving reasons, why the sword is just there without any support, we came up with the idea of what if he's got a tattoo, where, like his father gave it, like brand him, like give him like a power something that you now from there that the source of power he's got which is would be in the back, because the sword appear always there. So that was the reason why the tattoo and we tried to connect the person with the sword. We have some movies, for example in Dexter. I like the moment when he's a child and he sees his mom die, and there is all the blood everywhere and from, because he was child he smelled the blood and stuff so that's why it's become like a crazy(?) for blood. We try, in the first, really first concept Dante had a white patch here *shows with his hand* you know white. I thought maybe when he was child he saw his mom killed, like people are shocked and they got a patch, yeah, maybe that one could be a sign of demoniac side of him something like that? Like, so give a reason why the white hair appear. That makes a more interesting story and more interesting things and little more ingame, little more story, more you know, really really Demon Trigger, the white does appeaper completely and so that we felt was really interesting.
Tameem: It was kind of an opportunity to grab this, and make it, um, our own. I think that's the only way to reimagine a franchise - whether it's music or film, or whatever - if it's just copy what was done before, it never moves on, it never changes, and I think where franchises have evolved it has been because there's been a successfull reinterpretation that's a bit unexpected.
The story was really about two brothers, the trust that slowly builds with them, and the reasons why they will, that trust is broken, and it's broken because of a human character Kat. So really it's a story of Dante's total rejection of humanity and being indipendent, change into someone who's actually trusts his brother, but because of this, because of the way his brother treats humanity and Kat.
One of our actors said this is a shakespearian, I whish she didn't say that, because now we've got lots of jokes about this is, "this is not Shakespear!". Yeah, I know it's not supposed to be Sheakespear, but it's uhm, *nods*, I thinks it's a simple story really. It's a simple story about.. a origin story of a guy who learns to trust.
At the same time, you know, there is some people that are complaining that there is too much cutscenes in. I don't think there is because they're all skippable, anyway, but I think it was really, important to just focus on Dante and not try and make it too complicated story about lots of other characters, at least in this game, in an origin, I think you should just stay on one character and keep it simple. I think a simple story told well is better than a complicated story told badly.
Talexi: I rally like, personally, mix Japanese-style with European. Even in comics or even in cartoons. Like for example Miyazaki; to me is a mix because often I can see influence of Moebius. And you can tell the design ready around(?) the creature in Mononoke and Princess and the God is really Moebius. When I see those together it's like "Wow", so I think we been doing this exactly same for Enslaved, for example, because it's the forest, in Enslaved is really like in Mononoke. A forest when I go there is god work is like whoa, the colors the blue and the green. Same thing in DmC. We had a really co-reference for the color, the landsflare, always in Manga-Anime, they push a lot the landsflare on top of everything like just to create a gradience of colors and I love that. In game we got real grafiti artist, but in that case [the picture of Sparda and Eva kissing], we made the grafit, me and Daniel Baker, our senior concept artist. *somethingsomething* was like telling because it's urban. We rally wanna bring this urban feeling of the city. So the best way was like tell the story through a graffiti. There is some, in the first moment we wanted to animate those graffiti, but it was really too complicated. But I think the, what we managed to do with the camera state on the graffiti, and the graffiti, like, glow a little bit, like, you know the old Egypt art, they telling story about the past? We tried to do exactly the same but in graffit. So go alrady there, you see is not peering(?) in the graffiti, they/stay(?) there like in the city, the city already people being talking about the past *magic hands~*.
Tameem really wanted to do, like to really push allways this urban graffiti love like Beriln, Banksy, stuff like. What I really wanted is like not have only one style of graffiti but have like different one, like Banksy, like more illustrate more this and that mixing toghether. So, like when you see a wall of graffiti usually a really mess, there's one and then one on top *makes hand gestures*, and then maybe a sticker *hand gesture*. Tameem bring us a lot of picture from Berlin is really cool so I said imagine if you can tell a story in that walls.
Tameem: Ah well, how we got there. Like first we thought about, what we wanna base this game and the concept rebellion is the most imp-, I think is the thing that we thought Dante should be about - his sword is called rebellion, so what is rebellion now, how do we see rebellion around us. If you have rebellion, you have to rebell against something meaningful. So we look at the world around us, we look at where rebellion is happening. It's happening on the internet, you know using social media. Anonymous, Wikileaks, Pussy Riot and Banksy.. like these all artistic, you know including artistic forms of rebellion, and they're all rebelling against what they precieve as evil. So I said let's take that stuff further. Instead of demons being guys with horns and scary eyes, which is not scary to anyone, let's make them scary in a different way, closer to us. So then we reached the world of satire, which we had back in Kung Fu Chaos, y'know, Kung Fu Chaos was like a joke on hollywood movies, and this, this is like a satire on society. And I thought that's a good thing to.. you know some like my favorite stuff like Day of the Dead was a satire. So I thought there is a fun opportunity there to say "Well what if those guys, that look like they're clearly mad on TV, or clearly evil, are actually demons?". I would say it's not a political leaning, it is not a political party behind. It's about rebellion against evil in all it's forms. Like in the game evil, it's very in-your-face, it's really, like I see it as, it's not a serious commentry, if it was serious it would be more like 1984. This is more brash, it's like really it's more of a cartoon of our world. It's a John Carpenter film, where the aliens control society, but you can only see them if you put glasses on. So this was just an idea when we thought, early on we thought "How do we make it contemporary and have demons walking down the street?" it's like, it doesn't work. The demons have to be hidden, and then, so how do we hide the demons? Okay, maybe a paralle dimension? Dante has devilblood in him so he can see it. And then it was clear like they lived in something very similar to that, the aliens control society, you put the glasses on and you see the messages. So, it was a rally cool kind of concept, that was a good idea in there and those ideas are perfect for now. Cause it's also like a lot of streetart, you know streetart with the OBEY and stuff, I think it all goes back to that film. That's what DmC wanted, for me, to, all kinds of things that I loved, like action cinema Matrix, Yuen Woo-ping, action choréography, Pulp Fiction, gunplay or Chow Yun-Fat style gunplay, and mixed it all up with rock music. That was to me the essence of Devil May Cry, bring together all kinds of cool forms of culture into a video game. So, we thought let's take that approche, while then, how can we copy Devil May Cry's combat, rock music, you know, bit-by-bit, it was like what's the music of now? What's the culutre of now? What are the heroes of now? What are the themes of now? What are the stories of now?
Telexi: At Ninja we tried to, we got talents, people in many area, we tried to do something that make everyone happy. like not only have music for background, but actually be part of the gameplay. For the club, I went to see the Pink Floyd concert. And I was shok-amazed by the projection 3D on the wall. Which the wall, would actually look like destroyed, and that's like amazing because it looked like the recreate exactly the building where the wall project. That's amazing, I though about what if we got inside of that instead of whatching. That was the idea I tried to being inside of, like it's very, very surralistic as the game, but more club look. There are many cities one is my home city(?), which is very similar to Barcellona, we got, I really like Barcellona, the fact we got that Gaudí quarter and urban place, you got even, you know a lot. I like city where it changes styles from modern you can go even Paris, you got amazing buildings and historical but you got the that area really modern that square buildings is really cool, so why not make a city, create a city where it's got exactly everything like that? I like mix styles because if you do everything completely gothic; there's manny games out of there, and many, it's a bit too classic only put gothics. But in the same time I love even as New York a shilouette, like the very long towers. Sometimes we try to stretched, those buildings we tried to do use european bulidings but by duplicate the same buildings like three-four times and make it even taller, just to have a feeling of New York like make big, big, big city like. As soon as I knew could be a bit more far fantasy, like Limbo, really like uhm, surrealistic paintings, where, like, in surrealistic paintings you've still got realistic objects, like old buildings, but like floating, cracking and like melting like Dalí's things like 'wow!'. And what I like it from surralism was to take every day we got in our life and interpret it in a different way, in a dreamy way, I like that aspect because is, our game, is like fantasy in some minor, it's got this fantasy area, it is very, it's not but it's got Limbo has to be specific has to be like fantasy I like that aspect of surrealism.
For sure what I personally like is usally gameplay goes horizontal but sometimes it's cool try to think about opposite way, so what about you go really really high and then go down. The Limbo give us the chance actually to twist the completely upside down. And just straight away I varied like deisgn which design people which got different way of thinking. "Yes but why can you go there?" I said, "Ah, well, I dunno.". We start with animate, oh how cool is that? When they think about "Oh wait, just a second maybe we can actually use that for gameplay" so is in the end more than the other games we done before we being really much more in talking in contact in sharing ideas.
Tameem: The best thing, I think actually, abaout working on this game was the people that came up. In a way I'm the face of DmC, like from a development point of view for all the stuff, all the **** comes to me - which is good. But the guys on the team, people like Rahni [Tucker], she's our combat designer. So there is a woman in games
, doing very much of combat system. She's basically created the whole system on her own, single handedly. Capcom, when the built their combat engine, they had about 5-6 combat designers and it's amazing that she's just managed to on her own. And in other areas of the game, all these guys were just really stepped-up in a way I've not seen people do. So it's been really good, really refreshing for me that actually my job has changed from being creative dictator to more like creative helper of peoople. So that's, yeah, it's been really cool.Talexi: I'm really proud that we rebooted something really, really famous, something really well-known, and it was a really big challange for us. And I think we, I'm proud if we stop with our area(?) we really, it's what Capcom wanted, really 've done and go ahead with your idea. And we proud that we did that, until the end. And the result are that everyone apparently love it very much and really appreachiate it and we got a lot of really good reviews from people, usually are really not so nice kind with video games.
Nina: But when you actually read the reviews, that's the thing that's the strongest really, because that what they're sayin is that we've successfully made a reboot. The game is valued in and of itself, and it's true to the DNA of the franchise, so we've hit all the most important things for us. It makes us feel really proud and well we thought we did, we don't know for sure, I'm so the world judges you, so, yeah, we're looking to the future and as of now we're amitious. So our next move is gonna be another big amitious move!
