[Note: You are currently reading Episode 2 of the Creators' Roundtable. Read Episode 1 here if you haven't yet.]
Kando: We began planning around two and a half years ago.
Arakawa: Right.
Kando: Before the DS went on sale.
Hasegawa: We began without seeing the handheld yet.
Kando: We've been working so hard that it's hard to believe it's already been two and a half years (laugh).
Arakawa: How did it all begin? I wasn't in the team from the beginning.
Kando: This was around the time when Jupiter was finishing KINGDOM HEARTS CHAIN OF MEMORIES for the GBA. We were having talks about working together again and were planning some ideas, and then we got an offer from [KINGDOM HEARTS director] Mr. Tetsuya Nomura.
Hasegawa: We immediately started writing the script (laugh). We then decided on the setting of the world.
Kando: Since Hasegawa and I are both graphic artists, we needed help from someone experienced in planning. So we had Arakawa come in to help us. Then we went to that Nintendo DS show.
Hasegawa: The show where we got to first touch the DS. We lined up to play the games.
Kando: Touch DS.
Arakawa: When was that? Somewhere around the end of October, I guess. [Editor's Note: The event took place in November 2004.] The DS wasn't even in stores and they told us to make a game for it (laugh).
Kando: (Laugh)
Arakawa: We said that we didn't have one to try out and asked how we could, then we were told to go to the show (laugh).
Kando: In the end it was a great chance to try out all the neat games. It was great.
Arakawa: I remember Nintendo's Yoshi Touch & Go. We didn't have a DS so we attended the show two or three times. Every time I went I played it, so I became pretty good at it (laugh).
Kando: How many times did you "test play" it? (laugh)
Arakawa: The booth staff would come over and comment on how good I was (laugh).
Kando: (Laugh) And you'd be like, "it's my third time!" (laugh)
Arakawa: I remember how I came to realize the capabilities of the DS then, thinking how amazing the touch screen was.
Hasegawa: It was really fun, getting to try out the touch screen.
Arakawa: I thought that it was awesome how I could really see what I touched do something in the game. When I first learned about the DS I had an idea that the bottom screen could be used for card games, like an extension to CHAIN OF MEMORIES. On the upper screen would be something like an action RPG. But after a while we wanted to use the touch screen for something more...
Kando: I remember your first planning documents. You had the idea of an action game that you controlled with the touch screen.
Arakawa: Right. Since we were going to be using a touch screen I thought that we should go in this direction, but we didn't even know the technical limitations of the touch screen yet, so we couldn't fully rely on it. I sent my plan anyway and made revisions, went to the show again, played with the DS some more… After a while the game plan started to concentrate on the lower screen more. I felt that the game wouldn't do the DS justice if it didn't use the touch screen.
Kando: In the beginning the three of us kept sending game ideas and were in arguments about it.
Arakawa: Right. I remember being chewed out by Mr. Nomura. He'd say "No, we could do this on the PSP," or something like that. The hurdle was really high from the get-go, because we set out to create "a game that can only be played on the DS."
Hasegawa: Coming up with what to do with the two screens was the biggest challenge.
Kando: We initially thought that the player would control the game on the bottom screen and watch the action happen on the top screen, but that always made one of the screens less important.
