Hometown Story

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.

NoE: The purpose of the game is not to make the shop as big as possible; it’s to make people happy. Please could you explain a little more about that?

YW: I don’t necessarily think that the player has to make every single character in the game happy! As the shop grows bigger and bigger, more people will visit and communicate with each other. But it’s not only the shop that is growing bigger – because of the growing shop, the community of the village is getting better.

New people will come to the village, and there will be new houses. When new people come to the shop, the player will learn about their worries, their feelings, their needs, and will build up relationships with every new character that comes to the village. Depending on how you interact with them, you might be able to guide them in a happy direction.

NoE: Why did you choose Nintendo 3DS for Hometown Story?

YW: We are a very small company at Toybox, and we couldn’t spend a large budget to release the game on a big console, so we chose a compact handheld. Also, from the beginning of my career I was very closely working together with Nintendo, and all my games on Nintendo consoles are very popular, so I thought it would be natural to go with Nintendo for my new game.

NoE: Many of your games have a similar theme of pastoral and family life. Who do you feel that you make games for?

YW: The target audience would probably be children, because I want to show them that there are not only games where you fight against and kill each other. If there were only the kind of games involving shooting and fighting, some parents would forbid their children from playing them. I want children to play games, with their parents too, and I also want to show them how friendly the world can be. I want them to grow up and be friendly to the people around them.

NoE: Do you think you would ever enjoy making a more action-oriented game?

YW: Yes, actually I would enjoy it. I developed No More Heroes with Goichi Suda – that was a fighting game, and I enjoyed it. I have ideas in my head for things like that, but there are a lot of people who are very talented at creating action games, so at the moment I believe I don’t have to!

NoE: Harvest Moon began a genre of life simulation and farming, which has become very popular in the West. Has that changed your approach to the creative process?

YW: Well, first I am very happy that there are a lot of games that take the farming idea – I’m happy that my idea was well adopted! For Hometown Story I wanted something much deeper, that involves the emotions in your heart more deeply, so it wasn’t influenced by this so much.

NoE: Some of the contributors to Hometown Story are Nobuo Uematsu, the composer, and artist Atsuko Nishida. What was it like to work with these two big names in Japanese development?

YW: It was quite simple, because we’d worked together before previously. I shared my ideas about the new concept with them and they said, “this sounds like a good project – let’s do it together!” (laughs)

NoE: Do you have anything you’d like to tell fans of the previous games you’ve made?

YW: I hope that all my fans will love playing even more games, and that they will love more people. Let’s be enthusiastic about playing videogames together!