The Latest on Legends 3: Minoru Nakai Speaks

411mania.com recently interviewed Minoru Nakai, Producer of Capcom’s upcoming Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop and a former member of the team which developed the Rockman DASH/MegaMan Legends and Toron ni Kobun/The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. The interview, which can be found in full here, took the time to ask about Nakai’s past work on DASH and what we might expect for the future.
Given that 411mania.com is a little saturated in pop-ups, we’re quoting the pertinent parts here:

You have also worked on the Rockman DASH series as well as The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. Can you tell about us your experiences doing those games?

Difficult question – I think, those two games, especially when you look at Rockman DASH, they really were kinda the first full 3D action games that were out there for consoles. Pretty soon after that you had The Legend of Zelda which kinda showed us the way in many respects, but it was really difficult without having an easy example to follow, so the entire time while designing the game we were trying new things. Figuring, ok, well – how is the boss going attack you in 3D? It was something totally new to us. How are the maps gonna work? How are they going to be laid out? In terms of technical ways, can you actually do what we really wanted to do for this game? So, all those things were really challenging from a “first time really attacking the problem” perspective, so we did a lot of trial and error, tried a lot of things. Some things didn’t work, some things did. But, both of those games ended up coming out pretty good. I think most people were happy with them, so it was a pretty successful experience overall.

Any plans for a sequel any time soon?

Certainly we hear this question a lot. People are really looking forward to the day when we finally do get a chance to do a sequel, especially one for Rockman DASH. There’s a lot of people, myself included, who want to make the sequels, but you really have to weigh the capacity of the company and look at all the other games that we’re involved in creating right now, and right now it seems like the capacity and the timing isn’t quite right for that sequel, but there are a lot of people who really want to make one, so it’s certainly something to think about, but not right at this moment.

Which one would you prefer doing – a Rockman one or a Tron Bonne one?

I’d rather do Rockman DASH if I had to do one.

Nothing earth-shattering, but at least it gives us a little more insight into the minds behind a possible sequel. It sounds as though the team has more experience in 3D now, and that one of the key problems is that it seems Capcom doesn’t quite have enough staff to take off of surefire moneymakers such as Dead Rising, Resident Evil, and Street Fighter to put onto a project like this.

News credit: 411mania.com, via Protodude’s Rockman Corner

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