SPOTLIGHT PREVIEW: METAL GEAR AC!D 2

by James Mielke 12.12.2005

AC!D REDUX: A conversation with Metal Gear Ac!d 2’s Shinta Nojiri.

1UP: I know you’ve made a lot of adjustments to MGA2. Since Ac!d 2 is actually coming rather quickly on the heels of the original, how’d you make such wholesale changes so quickly? Like the new Acid Shading graphics engine.

Shinta Nojiri: Well to start off, I’m originally a planner, that’s how I joined Konami. And I think that really helped in putting such a tough project together in such a short amount of time. I’m not a programmer or designer, but that allows me to focus on planning the game and to create the game scenarios as well. So I’m not focusing on designing or programming.

Going into production for MGA2 there were two things we wanted to do specifically. The first thing was to change the graphics in Ac!d 2, simply because the first Ac!d resembled the Metal Gear Solid series, and it kind of resembled it too much, and we wanted something that was uniquely Ac!d [Acid Shading] and that brought along this very colorful, American comic look to the game. Secondly, the TobidACID – in America we’re calling it the Solid Eye – and that’s another feature that instead of going along with everybody’s expectations for the sake of the sequel, by brinigng more cards, adding more characters. That’s why I went with something completely different and that’s the 3D glasses, the Solid Eye.

1UP: Why make another one so quickly. Was this a corporate mandate, to produce another sequel within a year of the first game’s release, or was it some personal creative need you wanted to get out of your system?

SN: This was actually a request of my boss, Mr. Kojima, to bring out another Ac!d by December of this year. Then it was my task as director of the game to gather the resources, the people together all in a short amount of time. It’s no secret that creating a handheld game isn’t like making a console game, so it doesn’t take as many resources. That said, the past year and a half has been almost Hell in terms of being so incredibly busy in development. There were so many different problems.

1UP: If Kojima asked you to make another one by this December, he must have like the first one. How does he feel about all the tangible changes for the sequel?

SN: To answer your first question, for MGA1, that was something I really worked on together with Mr. Kojima on a lot of different details on the game. For MGA2, he let me do my own thing, and he kind of trusted me with its development. I’m not sure if Mr. Kojima likes MGA2 or not, but as far as my team’s concerned, they’ve already forgotten about MGA1, and they all love MGA2. They’re very happy with it.

1UP: How old are you?

SN: 34. [Laughs]

1UP: How does someone so relatively young get to direct games bearing the Metal Gear name? Your first title was Metal Gear Ghost Babel for Game Boy Color [titled Metal Gear Solid in the States], which is nearly six years old, making you 27 or 28 at the time. And then you went on to work on the Boktai titles and now the Ac!d series. I imagine he’s very protective of the Metal Gear series, so he must obviously trust you a great deal to put such responsibility in the hands of someone so young.

SN: [Laughs] I don’t really know for sure! It might have been out of necessity. Mr. Kojima was working on MGS3, and there was no way he could split his body in half and have two Kojimas to work on Ac!d and Snake Eater at the same time. I’m sure it’s very scary to give Metal Gear to another person, so maybe that’s why he put it on a handheld because if you make a mistake it’s really not that big of a deal compared to a handheld version. And maybe because we sold over 600,000 of Ac!d worldwide, it’s possibly another reason why he entrusted me with MGA2.

It’s really difficult to make a traditional Metal Gear, because there’s so much that’s intrinsic to Mr. Kojima, so maybe that’s why I’m doing this spinoff. All by myself, a test subject! [Laughs]

1UP: That’s the humble answer, but maybe Kojima’s grooming you to direct a Metal Gear Solid game some day. After all, with every episode of MGS, Kojima threatens that it’s his last one. So maybe this is his way of preparing you to take over the reigns at a later date.

SN: I don’t know what’s going on inside his head but I think it might be different. [Laughs] I think he’s more thinking about diversifying the line, and putting me in charge of a project that can sell. That’s more along the lines of Mr. Kojima’s thinking.

1UP: Metal Gear games are known not only for their graphical quality, cinematic presentation, and their innovation, but also to their attention to detail. Is there anything in Ac!d 1 or Ac!d 2 that follows this trend?

SN: What Mr. Kojima is working on are things that are unique to console games, like PS2, things that you can do with those consoles. For me, I’m more interested in doing something only handhelds can do, such as the Solid Eye peripheral.

1UP: You worked on Boktai, which made use of an integrated solar-cell to influence the gameplay. And now you have the Solid Eye for Ac!d 2. Do you enjoy creating games that may not require, but benefit from the use of an added peripheral?

SN: As for Boktai, the sun radar is really an idea that was Mr. Kojima’s. The thing I’m really interested in are peripherals that allow you to have a different experience.

1UP: How does Solid Eye actually help the gameplay?

SN: Let me put this together to show you some things. [Assembles a Solid Eye] One thing I’d like to point out is that you don’t need this to play the game. It’s supplementary. You can play without the glasses, or you can play the whole game with the glasses on for the whole game.

1UP: Does the new graphics engine do anything special to help accommodate the Solid Eye?

SN: Yeah, the new graphic style was made with the new peripheral in mind, and it’s easier to see the 3D graphics with this new colorful Acid Shading.

1UP: Will the new screenshots you can take in MGS3: Subsistence and transfer to Ac!d 2 for viewing not benefit as much from the 3D effect?

SN: [Laughs] That’s a really tough question. One thing that’s kind of fundamental is that the pictures you take in Subsistence are just a 2D shot. It’s not moving. But in Ac!d 2, of course it’s in 3D and moving so I think that’s why it’s going to be a big change. Do you think that’s cool? [Hands 1UP the PSP with TobidAcid/Solid Eye Theater mode activated]

1UP: [Watches movies from the Solid Eye Theater, which Nojiri-san selected, showing the Sabra girls in various states on undress] Wow.

Solid Eye THEATER: Metal Gear Boobies?

SN: So this is called the Solid Eye theater. You can access this mode by collecting cards, and there are certain cards where you unlock these movies.

1UP: This is the best! Is everyone at Kojima Productions always thinking about how to put chicks in your games? This girl is in a bikini getting totally hosed down by water pistols. I’m turning red.

SN: Everybody’s thinking about it.

1UP: What do the female members of the staff think about it?

SN: They give me cold stares.

1UP: Oh here’s a girl who’s breathing heavy, and she’s sitting on the steps in a bikini. A leather bikini. She looks like she’s going to throw up.

SN: So the videos you’re looking at, it’s a collection of pretty much all the videos we have in the game. But when you first buy the game there’s only going to be maybe like…

1UP: Two girls?

SN: Three girls. And one video from MGS3: Snake Eater. You continue with the game, collect more card, unlock more videos, the rarer the card, the sexier the video.

1UP: That’s incentive! Is the American version to have the same content?

SN: The current plan is yes to have the same models in the American version as the Japanese version.

1UP: I’m importing it just in case. It’d probably be hard if I can’t read everything on all the cards.

SN: If you did import it, you could play it. It has a lot of things that are fundamentally MGS. The way you move your characters. But something that’s unique to Ac!d is that the cards have lots of text, lots of strategy. And that’s very fundamental to learning the whole new system of Ac!d, and that might scare away people who aren’t willing to invest the time into learning the game system. So if they just pick it up for a few minutes, or the Japanese version, will think “This is a crappy game” unless they go deeper into it.

1UP: [Noticing the amazing depth of field in the unlockable MGS3 cutscenes] For the unlockable movies in Ac!d 2 that come from MGS3: Subsistence, did you have to take the original animation data and re-render them using some special filter or process so they’d “pop” in 3D like this?

SN: Actually this was quite a big production, to get the Snake Eater videos into 3D. We took the pre-PS2 renderings, the wireframes, and had to alter them in a very high-tech way to make them into 3D, even though the glasses themselves are very low-tech. It took a lot of manpower. Let me show you something cool. It’s not girls though.

1UP: [Nojiri hands the PSP back to 1UP, with the Metal Gear Solid 4 TGS trailer running, in full 3D] Oh, man. This is unreal. Did you have to put this through the same process as the other movies?

SN: Yes. The same process, it took lots of money and lots of time. It took two weeks and we borrowed people from the MGS team. It took about 16 people to put this 3D trailer together.

1UP: Wow, this is so cool. Like in the very beginning when it’s just some soldier looking around from a first-person view, it feels totally 3D. Then when Snake comes up and jacks him it’s like “Oh, damn!”

SN: If you start getting 3D sickness, look away. But if you don’t have that, keep looking. [Laughs] It’s a very expensive technology that uses an expensive software.

1UP: While this Solid Eye is made out of cardboard, albeit a rather sturdy cardboard, over the years it’s going to be subject to wear and tear. Do you have any thoughts about making a more permanent model, completely out of plastic or something?

SN: As of right now we don’t really know what we’ll do in the future. Right now we only have one 3D game, but I have confidence in games being made in 3D, so maybe this isn’t the only you’ll time you see it.

1UP: Will using this help me pick up chicks on the bus?

SN: No, you’re going to get in an accident if you use it outside of your house, so please use it indoors. It’s easy to take it off and play it like a regular PSP game outside, and that’s the kind of way we were thinking about it. And at home you can play in 3D.

1UP: Do you have to activate the 3D mode? I see here that when you look at it without the 3D glasses it actually displays 2 of the same images.

SN: But when you go into Solid Eye theater, it automatically goes into 3D so you can use it with Solid Eye goggles. But for the game itself, push the start button, go into Solid Eye mode. You can turn it on and off.

1UP: Can you watch Solid Eye theater without the goggles?

SN: It’s something only intended for Solid Eye goggle.

1UP: Just wondering what happens if little Johnny Gamer if he loses his Solid Eye on the bus.

SN: There’s 40 movies in the theater. We were barely able to fit them all on the UMD.

THE WAY YOU PLAY: Reinventing Ac!d.

1UP: What sort of improvements to the gameplay did you make for Metal Gear Ac!d 2?

SN: For one thing, we have a lot of new cards. You can bring a card from MGA1 into your save file in MGA2. You can bring one card over from MGA1.

1UP: One card? Why one card.

SN: We were really worried about game balance and being too powerful. The ones we let you bring in are pretty powerful in the game.

1UP: Are there any money-shot cards that are just like killer for bringing over into MGA2?

SN: Especially like Metal Gear Rex, Metal Gear Ray, Shagohod, and Mach 2 cards, kind of like boss cards. They’re really powerful in MGA2 if you bring them over from MGA1.

1UP: Was there any feedback you got from the first game that you took to heart when making the sequel.

SN: Actually I listened to a lot of criticism and reactions from fans of MGA1. Especially the interface, the gaming interface, an the camera. And that’s one of the things I concentrated on in MGA2 to make it more fluid. But if you play MGA2 you’ll find it’s much more fluid, much more intuitive. So now you sort of move into real-time during your turn, and you can press the D-pad for different actions, like crouching or knocking.

1UP: So is the cost of the move subtracted from your deck automatically?

SN: There’s no cost, you can do it all in your turn, these moves.

1UP: So you did this to increase the pace of the game?

SN: Right. It’s all real-time within your turn. See, here I’m using a card here, and now I’m using a weapon, and moving around.

1UP: So what made you decide to make Metal Gear Ac!d a card-based strategy game, as opposed to, say, a straight-up turn-based strategy-RPG?

SN: As we were making MGS3, we said this is a good time to try something different. We had this handheld system to work with, so we decided to make something a little unique. That was one reason, but the other reason we went with this gameplay style, obviously because it’s a handheld system you’ll be playing it outside, and you might be interrupted, but since it’s a card-based game you can be interrupted, you can set it down, and you’re not going to miss a cinematic or a key point in the story, like a standard MGS game where you need to sit down, hook up the audio system and focus on the cinematic quality of the game.

We also had a cool strategy in that if we put this card game on a PS2, a Ac!d game on the PS2, there was a chance it wouldn’t sell because it’s a strange idea or whatever reason, but we launched this game along with the system hardware in Japan and it was a good chance to try something now. People are going to pick it up because it’s Metal Gear, and it’s a great chance of success by launching along with the hardware.

1UP: I guess it still, in a way, was like a turn-based strategy RPG, but the cards really provide a greater vehicle for Metal Gear fan service.

SN: So this is something we put in to appeal to fans. As far as gameplay is concerned, you can choose which cards you want to put in your deck, and create your own way of approaching the game and creating your own gameplay style and strategy style. So that was one of the reasons we went with a card-battle approach.

1UP: Who would you say are the more hardcore MGS fans? Americans or Japanese?

SN: I think it’s probably more so in America, but there’s many hardcore fans in Japan as well.

1UP: One thing that makes Metal Gear so fun is that you always feel like you’re being set-up with this serious, real-world perspective, whether it’s via nuclear threat, or terrorist scenarios. But then just as things verge on being a little too bleak, here comes a boss with thunderbolts coming out of his face. It brings it back into a very comic book style of storytelling, which is not only cool, but a relief as well. I notice you’ve done this with MGA2 as well, with the bosses being these really bright, over-the-top kind of enemies, who can shoot their fists at Snake, etc. Do you guys have fun with that?

SN: One thing that I think as far as MGS is concerned, it’s really something that’s unique to Mr. Kojima and whatever may be going on inside his head. But as far as Ac!d is concerned, this is something that’s going on inside my head. People’s ideas are different, people are different, so this is the result of that. So maybe thats one reason that compared to MGS, Ac!d doesn’t have a lot of political overtones. I could put MGS elements in this game, but since it’s something that’s unique to me, I create the story and the lines the characters are saying. Ultimately what I wanted to do was to create something that was very professional, it’s still Metal Gear, but something that’s very unique to my thinking and to my heart.

1UP: What are the main themes for MGA2? What are the most important core elements of the game?

SN: I think people could probably guess what it is about me that I really want to focus on and that is actually the card element of the game, and that is the most frequently addressed criticism of Metal Gear Ac!d as well, is the card element. But this is something that was my idea to integrate into Metal Gear, and I actually go about explaining why Metal Gear is connected to this card game idea in the actual story of Metal Gear Ac!d 2.

1UP: Is this revealed toward the ending?

SN: Yeah, it’s hidden within the game. I don’t want to spoil the whole story, so that’s why I can’t say precisely where it’s revealed.

1UP: How much liberty do you have with the whole Metal Gear mythology? Does this take place somewhere specific within the MGS timeline, are you allowed to pick whatever characters you want from the universe, or are these total side-stories, where you can create as much as you want?

SN: Well the project that Mr. Murata, Mr. Kojima, and [MGS character designer] Mr. Shinkawa are working on is the main Metal Gear universe, and they’ve allowed me to create a side-story, a gaiden. But this isn’t a bad thing, in my opinion. I haven’t lost anything, it allows me to have a lot of freedom in the way that I view my own Metal Gear ideas.

1UP: Now that you’ve wrapped up Metal Gear Ac!d 2, it seems like you’ve had a lot of fun making this one. Are you already planning ahead to the third one?

SN: Well, actually, right now what’s going on in my head is the whole idea of localizing all the game for every territory. That’s the next stage. But as far as my next project it’s something I’m really thinking about, and so far nothing’s been decided. So as of two weeks ago it was only MGA2 so I haven’t had much time to think of what’s next.

1UP: What if Kojima called you in the middle of the night and asked you to make a Metal Gear Kart Racer?

SN: [Laughs] I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’m the one who came up with the card idea first, so I’d have to present the idea to Mr. Kojima to start off with, so I don’t think it’s going to happen. But it does sound of like a kind of good idea. [Laughs] My stomach is full of card games right now, so that’s all I’m thinking about right now.

1UP: What else is there about Metal Gear Ac!d 2 that we should know about?

SN: As you many know, the U.S. version of Metal Gear Ac!d 1 includes a 2-player wireless battle mode, which is more like a stealth game, where the two players battle it out in stealth. But this time we’re including it for the Japanese version, and obviously for American and European versions, but instead of focusing on stealth and people hiding, it’ll be more head-to-head battles. I’m sorry, I really wanted to put in an infrastructure mode, but we just couldn’t do it in time. My team and I always play in Ad hoc mode, and I think I might be the weakest player on the team. [Laughs]

The gameplay of the multiplayer is so different from the story mode, in the way you put the cards in your deck. I was surprised to find that for someone who thinks up the card ideas, I could be so easily beaten by someone who thinks along the terms of the gameplay and how to beat me. It’s kind of embarrassing. [Laughs]

1UP: That’s interesting. What do you think of the Design-A-Card contest you guys? Do you think someone might create a card so powerful it’d throw the design out of whack?

SN: We’re going to have to be really careful about the cards that we put into the game, and choosing cards that are not too powerful. We’re thinking about how the player goes about collecting these special cards, and maybe that’s by putting a password into the game. Maybe by having the user’s name, whoever created the game, for example if you made a card that got into the game, you’d put in “Milkman” to unlock the card.

1UP: Well, that’ll give us a lot to look forward to. Thanks for your time and good luck with Ac!d 2. END