Gravity Rush, the artistically beautiful PS Vita action game from the talented minds at SCE Studios Japan has yet to see a release outside Japan, but that hasn’t stopped the team from talking about the title before its June release.
In an interview with the PS Blog and IGN, Director Keiichiro Toyama and Art Director Yoshiaki Yamaguchi talked about where inspiration for the game came from, citing a rather surprising source.
The game I was most influenced by was Crackdown. I really liked the aspect of unlocking skills and becoming more powerful, and achieving a higher level of freedom as you become more powerful. Plus the open-world setting. I enjoyed moving in that game.
The two went on to discuss the difficulty in crafting the main character, pointing out that designing a protagonist that would appeal to everyone was particularly challenging.
The main character was the most difficult thing to lock down, so we thought a lot about it. If we made something completely Japanese, then it would be only acceptable to Japanese users, and we’ll lose audience in other territories. So we avoided that.
We also wanted to make a female protagonist, but we thought that in other territories there are not so many female lead characters. But Lara Croft is pretty well accepted, and we thought that the reason she was is probably because she is exotic and serious. So we wanted Kat to have that exotic feel, and even though she’s tiny, we wanted to make her powerful and strong. Like a ninja: small, but agile. By adding that, we finally fixed the character design.
Gravity Rush is set to launch stateside for the PlayStation Vita on June 12th.
