Platinum ‘learned a lot from Nintendo’
Nintendo hasn’t bought Platinum Games (wouldn’t that be an interesting development?) but the company is acting as publisher for Bayonetta 2, which has become one of the bigger Wii U games of this year. Speaking to CVG, director Yusuke Hashimoto describes how the relationship has benefited the game and says Platinum “would love to do it again.”
“I feel that it’s important to let your creativity flow and Nintendo has been able to provide us with the freedom to do what we had originally envisioned,” he explained. “We were able to have a lot of back-and-forth between Platinum Games and Nintendo and they were able to provide objective feedback; ‘Maybe that’s a little too much’, or, ‘maybe you should try this’. I feel that was really good and helped push Bayonetta 2 to even higher quality.”
According to Hashimoto, the team “started out with a fundamental freedom, with Nintendo telling us to go and create the game as we saw fit. But as the game started to take shape and we were starting to put all the pieces together, they were able to point out some things that we didn’t realize ourselves. That was really helpful for us.”
If given the chance, he said he’d “definitely like to keep nurturing this franchise,” whether it be him directing a second time or someone else at Platinum taking over the reigns. And, based on the positive comments made about Nintendo, perhaps a similar arrangement would be made.
Interview: How Nintendo’s input improved Bayonetta 2 [CVG]