Nintendo of Europe: Firstly, please introduce yourself and your work to our readers.

Yasuhiro Wada: My name is Yasuhiro Wada, and my company is Toybox Inc. Around 20 years ago I created the first version of Harvest Moon, which was localised in collaboration with Nintendo. At the time Nintendo was very co-operative in localising the game to make it easy to understand for European players, so I’m very grateful for this. Over the years I think there have been almost 30 versions of Harvest Moon released together with Nintendo. I think we can say Harvest Moon is very popular in Europe, and I feel very happy about that. The last Harvest Moon I was involved with was Harvest Moon: The Tale of Two Towns, and now I’m concentrating on developing a new game that is coming out really soon for Nintendo 3DS: Hometown Story.

NoE: Can you tell us a little more about what Hometown Story is about?

YW: It’s a game which makes you like human beings more than you liked them before. You start with a very small shop, and during the game it gets larger and larger – that’s the basic premise of the game. But making the shop bigger and bigger is not the purpose of the game.

The biggest difference compared to Harvest Moon is that there is a variety of very different characters who all have a deeply and carefully developed story behind them. The player develops his own story by interacting and communicating with the characters, of which there are about 30. That becomes the player’s story.