The Wii’s control scheme also prompted Kikuchi and Shibata to reconsider how the game would control. Naturally, you can of course hear sounds coming from your hand, and there’s also the vibration function, and we also incorporated many different ideas, so if you can, for this game it’s better to put your headphones to one side and play it with your TV volume up high.” “But this time we had a new challenge, and thinking of the Wii Remote speaker as a single speaker, we produced lots of things for it. “Previously in the series, playing the games while using headphones allowed you to reach the climax of fear by turning up the sound,” explained Shibata. They wanted to make use of the Wii’s unique control scheme to provide a feel of realistic, physical interaction with the game world, but also to make creative use of the Wii Remote’s speaker to add a new dimension to the presentation by playing ghostly phone calls and other effects through it. Given the possibilities the Wii hardware offered, Shibata and Kikuchi decided that a core concept in the game’s development should be the idea of “feeling fear with your body”. Us at Tecmo, of course, concentrated on the fear for this entry in the Zero series, going to the very heart of a traditional horror game and tackling it head-on.” Also, Grasshopper is a company with great technological strength when it comes to characters’ expressions and actions, which I think added a livelier feeling to the game. The Nintendo development staff were really reliable with pointing out parts in the series up until now where we’d been vague or seemed to have made light of something, which I think increased the game’s quality. “All three companies involved in the collaboration have their own unique styles,” added producer Keisuke Kikuchi, “so when we put together everyone’s opinions it was a complete and utter mess, but I think it went really well. As for further improving quality, I don’t think we could have done that without working with Nintendo and Grasshopper, and I think that those companies cooperating with Tecmo raised this game up a notch to another level.” “If we had worked on the same hardware, I don’t think I would have been able to do that. “Though I took it for granted when making the games before, working with two other companies let me completely review things in a big way and see what could make the game even better,” noted Shibata in conversation with the writers of the game’s official guidebook. It’s not entirely clear what made him reconsider, but despite a dislike for the horror genre he had some previous experience thanks to his work as producer and designer on 2004 cult classic Michigan: Report From Hell… and a background as an undertaker prior to joining the games industry. Speaking with Destructoid ahead of 2016’s HD remaster of his debut title The Silver Case, Suda revealed that he doesn’t like horror games and even rejected Tecmo’s initial invitation to work on Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, but ultimately decided to participate in the project. To this end, the project would ultimately become a collaborative effort between Tecmo, Nintendo - to whom Shibata had pitched the initial idea - and Grasshopper Manufacture, who contributed the considerable talents of Goichi “Suda51” Suda to the project as co-director, co-writer and designer. Series director Makoto Shibata had been inspired to create the new game when he saw the new possibilities that the Wii hardware and its unique control scheme offered, and was keen to reevaluate the series with this in mind. Tecmo was pretty up-front about the fact that the fourth installment in the series was going to be a Nintendo Wii exclusive. And it was the first installment to make a number of mechanical shakeups to the basic Project Zero formula, which would become fixtures in subsequent releases. It was the first installment to leave the series’ original host platforms of PlayStation 2 and Xbox. It was the first installment to not be exclusively developed by Tecmo. Known as Zero: Tsukihame no Kamen in its native Japan and Mask of the Lunar Eclipse in the West following an ambitious (and successful) fan-translation project, this fourth game represented a number of “firsts” for the series. This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!Īnd so it is that we come to the fourth installment in the Project Zero series: a game that never came West in an official capacity.
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