While many music games have gone the way of the dodo in recent years, Theatrhythm is a game that's taken the trend in the other direction. First arriving on the scene at exactly the point where others were abandoning it, Theatrhythm mixed together rhythmic screen tapping with the orchestral scores of decades of Final Fantasy games to great effect. Now, a kind of 1.5 version that bundles all of the music from the first game - both the songs that came on the cartridge, and as downloads - and adds in a whole host of extra tracks and modes for good measure is on the verge of being released. With a demo available on the 3DS eShop as of today, and only a few days to go until the game's release, we sat down with the game's Producer, Ichiro Hazama, to talk about all things music, Final Fantasy and Theatrythm: Curtain Call.
Ichiro Hazama himself. Don't worry, he was happier than this on the day.
First things first, can you tell us a bit about the new features for Curtain Call?
Ok, the two main features we have for this time round can be broadly split into the two new modes, which are the Quest Medley mode and the Battle mode. The Quest Medley mode uses very traditional RPG-type mechanics, and RPG-type presentation [in true Final Fantasy style]. In that mode you travel on a little map, with lots of different stages, on a little adventure between the various music stages there. Each of these individual maps has its own special characteristics - on some of them you'll earn a lot more experience points than you would on other maps, and on others you've got some very rare items to pick up. You can also have a lot of fun using the communication modes [i.e. StreetPass] to exchange and swap the maps with other players.
The versus mode is also a completely new mode this time, and involves two players playing off against each other, again using some of the music from the game. So those are the two main new features we've got.
The Final Fantasy series is known for its epic music - in fact, it regularly features in the Classic FM Top 100 (this year, it was number 7)! How do you go about choosing which of the many, many songs to include in the game?
I know! The Final Fantasy series has been going for a very long time - you've got the main line numbered titles in the series, from one to fourteen, and in addition to that you've got lots of spin offs and other minor titles out there, and they've all got their own songs and music in there as well. So, I mean, if I were to just pick the songs I liked a lot, and put those in - I'm personally a fan of Final Fantasy VI, so I think you'd probably wind up with a big, unbalanced [list that's] very distorted towards one Final Fantasy, and probably in my case that would be VI. So, what we decided to do rather than do the preferences of the development team and the designers, we'd put the songs from Final Fantasies [in, in] as even and as broad a way as possible. We also looked at the popularity of the songs and put in the ones that were the fan favourites. We actually carried out various surveys asking what people liked, and also looked at some of the online rankings people did for songs. And in that way I think we managed to get a good balance of songs from all of the Final Fantasies rather than what we would have done had we just stuck to us.
Swipe as the icons pass over the circle. Easy you say? Wait 'til you try it.
Are there any plans for a third game in the series, whether Final Fantasy or otherwise?
For the Final Fantasy series, this is going to be the final, complete, Final Fantasy title for the Theatrhythm series. And I think we've put in everything we wanted to do with Final Fantasy. But indeed, we've got a lot of other very good IPs out there who all have some great, great music in them, so I'd very much like to go on and maybe challenge ourselves to do a Theatrhythm game based on another IP. So I'm sure you can see something exciting in the future for Theatrhythm.
How about a Kingdom Hearts spin off? Or including some songs as DLC for Curtain Call?
I mean, obviously it would be good to do something like that, but there's a couple of things that we'd have to think about in doing that. First of all, we'd have to talk to Disney and get their OK on it, because of what Kingdom Hearts is, but in addition to that I think that if we were going to do a version of Theatrhythm based on Kingdom Hearts, we couldn't really just make it a direct port of this game, and just re-skin it with Kingdom Hearts characters and songs, because if you look at the way that Theatrhythm is created it's very much based on/represents the Final Fantasy games. So if you look at the basic construction of the screen and the way it's laid out, how all the characters appear on the right and the monsters appear on the left, it looks like an old school Final Fantasy battle, the sort you had from I up to VI. So we really have optimised the game to represent Final Fantasy, and if we were going to do Kingdom Hearts, we'd really have to change that round and make it something that really looked and felt more like Kingdom Hearts. I'm a big fan of Kingdom Hearts myself, I really like the game, so it would be really good to do that, although it's perhaps not as easy as you think.
The first game appeared on iOS some time after its 3DS release - will Curtain Call be doing the same?
To give the short answer to that question, we don't have any plans for porting to other platforms at this time. One of the main reasons for that is that we've been thinking about the future, of how we want to support Theatrhythm - this title - rather than going sideways and having it on several different platforms, and we really wanted to use the Curtain Call game as a baseline, and expand that with further downloadable songs and content and make it a full and more enjoyable catalogue. So that's what we want to put our effort into - expanding with DLC, rather than trying to put the same thing on multiple platforms. That's currently what our plans are for the series.
Based on fan feedback from the original game, are there any changes you've made to the game system?
The Quest Medley mode, adding an element of progression to the songs
One of the points we had a bit of feedback about from the first one that we've really tried to improve on in Curtain Call is the ease of getting into the game, and how accessible it is to start playing and play all the songs. In the first one, you had to play for quite a long time to unlock all of the songs - you had to go through the game a number of times to unlock each one - and this time we've tried to make that a lot easier, so you'll be able to play pretty much all of the songs on the cartridge after a short amount of play. I think after playing the game for say, half an hour or so, you should have access to pretty much most of the catalogue then, rather than having to slog through getting bored. So that's one of the features that we really tried to address in this one. But I think, what we had a lot more requests for, rather than people asking for changes to the system - they seem to quite like the system - was asking for individual tracks and songs. Could we add this one? Please, I love that one? Can we have this one? So in that sense we decided to really concentrate on expanding the number of Final Fantasy music tracks on the [cartridge]. So I think in the first game we had just under a hundred tracks available to play, but this time round we've really gone for it and gone up to 221 tracks, and hopefully we can please a lot more people with the amount of content we put out this time.
Here's an interesting one - as a few of the big Final Fantasy songs include a vocal track, have you ever considered a karaoke style mode for it?
That's... a very interesting thing. I mean, interesting enough, I'd never thought of it right up until you asked me this question! Erm, I think, obviously that would change the core gameplay of the game quite a lot, and so we'd really have to think very hard about whether it was something we could have included in the game. But now you mention it, I'm sure there might be some mileage in that, so I'll take that as an idea, and perhaps you'll see something in the future!
Are there any songs that you personally would have liked to get into the game that didn't make the final cut?
In terms of the actual songs that went into the final version of Curtain Call, I think that I got all the ones that I really wanted to get in there. There's a lot of the fan requests that I couldn't quite put in there, but I think in terms of what I wanted, it works out that I got all the ones I absolutely had to have. It's probably not that I intended to do that, more it just worked out that way in the end. So that was quite lucky!
But I think certainly, looking to the future, I'm going to be working on other Final Fantasy projects, for example, what we're doing now with the port of (Final Fantasy 7 mini-game) G-Bike (iOS/Android), and in that I'm going to be going back over some of the old Final Fantasies and maybe seeing some music from them, or some new music, and then thinking 'oh, I like this song - this is a really good song. Maybe I could include this in Theatrhythm.' But fortunately, we've already thought of that because Theatrhythm is set up to be expanded by DLC, so I'm very relieved that if that sort of thing does happen I'll be able to go right, we'll just expand it with some DLC. So in the future, if these things happen, I've got it sorted.
So will Curtain Call be getting its own DLC?
There are actually about 40 tracks which have already been released in Japan as DLC, and there's a couple more to come I think. I mean, when you look at the whole Theatrhythm experience and compare it to the Final Fantasy series as a whole, in a way it's sort of a title that's never going to be complete. If you look at the whole Final Fantasy back catalogue, and all the music from that, I think, it comes to well over 1000 tracks, a 1000 different songs, and it's very difficult to get all of that into any game. But no, I think because we've set it up to use the DLC, and be expanded through that, slowly, with everything we release, it can get closer and closer to that complete Final Fantasy catalogue. And yeah, like I say, you've got 40 tracks already released in Japan, and all of the things we have released in Japan, rest assured they're going to be coming to Europe and America as well. So everyone's going to be able to play those songs, and hopefully we'll expand it even further after that - it's just going to keep on growing really.
Some stages have you playing along to cutscenes from games, for extra visual oomph.
With Final Fantasy games usually, the reason for a delay is because of the sheer amount of text they contain, which all needs to be translated. But with a game such as Curtain Call, which is light on text, that's probably not the case - so why has there been the delay in reaching these shores?
I mean, you're completely right - the game doesn't have as much text as the other Final Fantasies, but the thing about localising games for other markets outside of the original Japanese version is that, even if there's not much text, the text that is there will have a lot of things that have to be done to it. Even if the translation work [is quick], there's also various technical issues we have to deal with - because when translating text, the same amount of text can take up different [amounts of] space on screen, you have to rearrange the layout and sometimes it exceeds the text boxes you've got, so someone has to go and fix that. All these technical issues aren't done by the localisation staff, but are actually done by the game's original development staff, so if we, for example, complete the game, release it in Japan, then do all the DLC, then as soon as that's finished go straight into the localised version, the staff have been working on that project for a very long time and they've had almost no break at all. We're really sorry that there are these delays, it's about a five month delay I think, as it was released in April in Japan and then it's about five months to September here. In my future projects I'm really going to try and cut down on that localisation period. But it's the development staff - they're only human, so we hope you understand and there are good reasons for everything!
One issue with the previous game is that it took a long, long time to unlock new characters, as you had to collect eight randomly-acquired crystal fragments for each - has this been sped up at all for Curtain Call?
The actual system that's used to unlock the characters, where you collect the crystal fragments and use those to buy new characters, hasn't actually changed a great deal from the original title. But because, obviously, we've got a lot more characters this time - 60 characters, so its a lot more - if it took a long time to unlock the characters, that may actually get in the way of players' enjoyment and they wouldn't like to keep slogging through just to unlock the characters they want to use. So I think, overall, it's quite a bit easier this time, a lot quicker to unlock a lot of the characters. Obviously the new Quest Medley mode is going to be one of the big ones for collecting the crystal fragments, so if you use that mode, maybe swap around the maps that have the best fragments and the most fragments with friends, then you can build up your amount of crystal fragments and buy new characters very easily in that way. So it should be a lot easier for new players. Incidentally, since the game was released, I've been playing it right from the start, from release, on my own, in my own time, and I managed to unlock all the characters reasonably quickly - so I don't think anyone should have any problems there.
