Character designer hints that Persona team's first HD game may be farther along than expected.
Vincent and his girlfriend Katherine. The Katherine character was revealed last week.
Here's a big surprise from theCatherine development blog. Character designer Shigenori Soejima revealed today that the game is currently in its final tuning phases!
This little revelation about the game's development progress was just one of a number of interesting points Soejima made in his first post at the game's blog.
You might recall that initial Famitsu advertisement which showed Catherine eating a slice of pizza. Soejima admitted that as he made that illustration, he was worried that it might be too much for an advertisement.
Soejima considers Catherine a challenge for him in many respects. It's his and his team's first HD development effort. It's in a new game genre that's not an RPG. It's also aimed towards adults, although he noted here that this is just in terms of story and it's not the case that young players won't be able to play the game.
Wrote Soejima, "As I play again the resulting work (it's presently undergoing final tuning!), I feel that it's not just a challenging title for us, but that it's quite the ambitious work."
He also discussed a bit about his work on the art side of the game. "You can probably tell this just by looking at it, but it's a bit... actually, it's quite erotic. It's very much different from the pure (?) Persona. But this is a necessity. It's an element that cannot be done away with if you want to realistically portray adult love. If you omit it because it's a consumer game, it's unnatural. So, we are challenging the limits. ... There, my excuse has come to an end. (laughs.)"
During the character creation process for Catherine, Soejima has been placing his attention on "reality." He says that all the characters, even those outside of Catherine and Vincent, have personal qualities, and there will be some characters who will make you think that there are similar types of people in the real world.
"Rather than the 'it would be nice if you could have this' type of ideal that you see in love games, this game will let you sample the sweet and rough areas of male and female relationships through a horror taste."
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