A portion of an IGN interview with Ninendo's Yoshihiko Ikebata and Ryuichi Nakada, as well as Next Level's Bryce Holliday and Brian Davis...
IGN: What role did Shigeru Miyamoto play in the development of this game? I know the first one was very near and dear to him.
Nakada: He was very deeply involved with this project as well. The main development of the title took place with SPD and all the good people at Next Level Games, but we did meet with Mr. Miyamoto once every two weeks or so to show him a ROM and give him updates on the progress of the game. He was able to provide feedback based on looking at our reports and playing with our game ROMs.
Holliday: For Miyamoto-san’s direct involvement with Next Level Games, he was kind of like a mentor. I believe he uses the word “shepherd.” He would often come in and steer the ship in a new direction when we were getting off course. We were able to play within the framework that he had set up, and the two gentlemen, Ikebata-san and Nakada-san, were kind of like the gatekeepers or the keepers of the rules. We would constantly be pushing the boundaries and seeing where we could get to, and then they would bring us back.
IGN: Was there any point where he just upended the tea table and made you redo something completely?
Holliday: Yeah… I think officially he said there was no true tea-table-flipping on this title. [laughs] But at one point he threw out all the bosses of the game and made us start over. From our angle that was kind of a tea-table-flip. But maybe it just had bad legs and was wobbling or something. He often challenged us to not go with our first idea, or to experiment further on different things and then cherry-pick our best ideas.
Davis: Luckily, with that many tea-table issues… that was toward the beginning of the project. We had only completed one boss. We had designed the other ones, but we hadn’t implemented them yet. What he wanted for that was, he wanted bosses that could only be in Luigi’s Mansion. If you saw a boss, you’d say, “That’s a Luigi’s Mansion boss!” I think that was the right choice. It allowed us to be very creative.
IGN: Did you ever toy with the Circle Pad Pro?
Holliday: We always wanted it to work with a single circle pad. When we moved to a second analog stick, because we’d actually changed that gameplay mechanic paradigm to the tug-of-war, it just wouldn’t work. There was nothing to do with the second stick. By changing, at the beginning of the project, the high-level strategy around the ghost fishing, we found that when we did experiment with the Circle Pad Pro, it didn’t add anything.
Davis: For me, the most fun I had working with a character was the Toad character. I’m not sure you’ve played with that character yet, but there are missions where you have to find Toad, free him, and escort him out of the mansion. There’s a connection between you and Toad. The ghosts can scare him, which causes a disconnect between the two of you, and he doesn’t enjoy that. He’s very scared. As a player, you want that connection between you two. For me, when I was developing that, it reminded me of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In the very first mission, you go and find the princess and try to lead her out of the castle. I tried to keep that in mind, to kind of honor the original designers of that game and have a little anecdote in there.
IGN: So Toad is Zelda.
Davis: [laughs] Not officially.
