"Translated talk with Masuda, Ohmori and Iwao from the Ultra Sun & Moon fan meeting in Tokyo, 12th May"

I had a go at translating an article about the fan meeting in Tokyo yesterday. No ground breaking information but maybe somebody will find it interesting all the same.On the 12th of May 2018, Game Freak hosted a Pokemon Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon Fan Meeting at the Pokemon Centre Mega Tokyo in Ikebukuro. Around 200 fans gathered for the occasion to listen to a special talk with some of the game’s developers. Here’s an overview of what was discussed.In attendance from Game Freak were producers, Junichi Masuda and Shigeru Ohmori, as well as Director Kazumasa Iwao.Pokemon Ultra Sun & Moon were Ohmori and Iwao’s first game serving as Producer and Director respectively (For the original Sun & Moon games they served as Director and Battle Director). They started the talk by mentioning that during development the dev team were conscious at all times of the word ‘Ultra’ featured in the title of the games.Masuda’s Producer position was more senior than Ohmori’s, however when it came to the Mantine Surf mini game, the plan for development was largely based on talks with members of the surfing community.In Ultra Sun & Moon, much like former titles, Masuda also had a hand in creating the soundtrack. We learned some details regarding one of his compositions for the games, the BGM for the fight with the Legendary Pokemon Necrozma. The theme for this battle was ‘Incompleteness’, and as such the feeling of instability was emphasized in the tracks composition. The implementation of the pounding bass drums, as well as a fast tempo and intensity not often present in Pokemon soundtracks was key to realizing this theme. Fellow GameFreak composer Go Ichinose created the battle theme for Ultra Necrozma by taking Masuda’s Necrozma theme and elaborating on the pipe organs to conjured a sort of godlike image for the arrangement.With the idea of conveying the supreme nature of the Pokemon’s supreme existence to the player in mind, the build up to the encounter with Ultra Necrozma had to be at least twice as intense as the Legendary encounters in the original Sun & Moon games stated Iwao. Although they considered Ultra Necrozma to be the most comprehensively powerful pokemon players have encountered so far, they still wanted to make sure that as long as you utilized the strengths of the pokemon your gathered together on your journey, in the end you would come out on top.In regards to the design of Ultra Necrozma, Iwao stated that, to put it bluntly, they wanted it to look cool. And when he considered “How do you make a cool pokemon?” naturally he concluded “You make it Dragon type”. With that as the primary design principle they set about creating a fusion of the Psychic type Necrozma and a new Dragon type form. With that said, the result was less an entirely new appearance, but rather a rearrangement of Necrozma’s body parts into a new Dragon shaped entity.The discussion next shifted to the group who played a large role in the story of Ultra Sun & Moon, Team Rainbow Rocket. In this game, 7 leaders of the villainous organisations from previous pokemon games gather together to form one super group led by Giovanni. It was initially planned that they would make their appearance as bosses in the Battle Agency, but it was decided that just appearing as holograms would be somewhat underutilizing them, and so Team Rainbow Rocket was created.These bosses were taken from parallel universes where the protagonist of their respective games never existed, or possibly failed to stop their schemes. On top of that, they each obtained a legendary pokemon to add to their teams. Taking the central role in this collection of villains was Giovanni, however the other villains were not exactly serving as his underlings, rather each of them found that their positions aligned with his cause and an alliance was naturally formed. The development team was happy with the idea that the appearance of these characters from previous Pokemon games might lead to more players gaining an interest in older titles.Next, the question and answers section:“How did the idea for Z-Moves come about?”.Ohmori answered:”With the implementation of Mega-Evolutions we didn’t want a situation where only Pokemon capable of mega-evolution would take all the glory, so for that reason we added Z-Moves."As Alola was themed heavily around Hawaii, the poses trainers make when activating a Z-Move were also designed with this theme in mind. One by one the dev team thought up ‘Aloha-like’ poses, even going as far as to hold internal Z-Move Pose meetings to come up with more ideas.“Are there currently plans for new Pokemon games?”Masuda started to reply:“We do have plans, but…”before stopping and inquiring“Do we have Nintendo Switch owners here?”to the audience. Which he then followed up by saying“If you don’t own a Switch, please, go and buy one”.Whatever could he have meant by that I wonder.(Addressed to Ohmori and Iwao) “What do you like most about Masuda-san?”.After thinking for a moment, Ohmori replied with a smile“A lot of what Masuda says seems to have no weight behind it, but the more you listen to what he has to say you realise there’s a lot of depth hidden in his carefree manner of speaking, and you come to understand the bigger picture of what he’s telling you. The more you chew on those words, the more flavour comes out, that cuttlefish-like nature is what I like most about him.”It seems like Masuda isn’t always able to convey the ideas in his head to the dev team, but Ohmori and Iwao have managed to forge a relationship with him whereby they can ‘just about understand’ what’s going on up there.When Masuda is working on a game, he has something of a fixation on making sure any loading that the game needs to carry out during gameplay is finished within 1/30th of a second. Especially in the Pokemon games, where the game is constantly loading data for the next section in the background while the player is progressing through a scene, Masuda likes to designs things around avoiding inflicting the stress of constantly having to wait for the game to finish loading on the player. Even in battles, data loading is masked behind move animations and Pokemon’s battle cries in order to avoid delays to the pace of battle. According to Masuda “The more graphics improve, the more time it takes to load data, so on that point right now development is becoming more difficult”. In that sense, back in the days of the Game Boy Advance Pokemon title’s sprite based art style it was a lot easier to manage, he reminisced.(Directed to Masuda) “What’s your fondest memory in life?”Without hesitation he replied“When I got married the other day”Prompting the audience to erupt into congratulatory applause.Finally, with the Q&A section over, on the subject of Ultra Sun & Moon, Masuda closed with a short message.“I feel like we were really able to draw out the appeal of the 3DS with these titles. It’s already been half a year since their release, but please continue to enjoy these games deeply. The next thing we’re all excited about is ‘Zeraora’ right? He’ll be making his debut in this years new movie, so please look forward to it.”With that, the event drew to a close.Source: https://ift.tt/2KhQ7t2 is the first time I've really translated something this long, and also my first submission on reddit so if my translation is wonky or my formatting could be improved please let me know. via /r/pokemon https://ift.tt/2KX3kZx