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Over the years, there has been a consensus in the gaming world that neither Japanese game developers nor gamers like first-person games. Although everyone thinks so, there are still many exceptions. Kenji Kimura, director of Ghost Line: Tokyo, and producer Masato Kimura believe that this claim has some basis. They believe this has to do with the fact that players in Japanese games value the character's design, and that it's also partly due to avoiding 3D dizziness that comes with the first person.
But Masato says he thinks that perception is fading, and there have been fewer calls in recent years. And that's just convenient for developers, as Ghost Line Tokyo is not only a rare first-person action game by a Japanese studio, but in many ways built around the first person.
Kenji says Ghost Line: Tokyo is Tango Gameworks' first first-person game, which isn't theoretically the case (as Haunted 2 has subsequently updated the first-person mode), but it's the studio's first game developed specifically for first-person. He said there were a lot of trial and error and exploration during the game's development phase.
"It's a big challenge for us." Kenji said so.
"We started from scratch and even put a lot of effort into doing the feeling of walking in the game. Because you need to add a certain amount of head shaking, but too many words will make people feel dizzy." He added: "If you don't have your head shaking, it will make people feel like they are floating in the map, and the body feels very strange." Developing this piece from scratch is a really tough challenge."
Kenji says the benefit of a lot of experimentation is that people are starting to rethink something that used to be tacitly agreed upon. For example, Ghost Line: Tokyo focuses on mid-range combat, rather than highlighting close-up or long-range combat as traditional design games do.
Tango's description of Ghost Line is an action-adventure game, but there are more design elements in this game than fights. Players use elemental abilities instead of firearms, and are able to use their hands to throw attacks such as wind, fire, and water at enemies. After the enemy takes a certain amount of damage, it will dissipate the point, giving the player a chance to catch their breath during the battle, or giving you a chance to escape. Ghost Line also has stealth attacks, melee combat, blocks, and bows and arrows. However, from my trial experience, these things are like auxiliary tools, not the player's default attack method.
In my 5-hour trial experience, the fighting style was always switched between far and near, first weakening enemies from a certain distance, then walking in and pulling out their core with an energy line. Although I am still a little uncomfortable dodging attacks, the scene at default difficulty is not too intense, and there is no major problem in terms of maneuvering.
Tango's goal for game balancing is to make the game easy to understand and well-paced, rather than forcing the player to study and remember different perspective controls, Kenji says.
"The game is about exploring the city, and there will be enemies in the way, but we don't want the difficulty of the battle to be too difficult to hinder the player's exploration," he said, "because a lot of the fun of the game is about exploration, so if you want to play more tactically, you can choose other difficulties, but at normal difficulty, the game does not test the player's strategy too much."
The gameplay of the exploration itself is also closely related to the first-person perspective of the game. Kenji said the team hopes to make the game experience a sightseeing tour and show players what Tokyo is like. The effect in the game is very good, and I am amazed by the variety of blocks and height differences.
Even the game's protagonists are designed around a first-person perspective. The logic of this design runs counter to the traditional Japanese concept of gaming mentioned at the beginning, and Kenji and Masato said that the development team's vision is to create a mass protagonist that can be integrated into the crowd, so that players can more participate in this character.
To a certain extent, the perspective of each game determines the experience of the game from a variety of subtleties. While playing the first two chapters of Ghost Line: Tokyo, I noticed a lot of content that was clearly designed around this perspective, and the game as a whole was great to play.
Compilation: Tonkotsu ramen