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Parappa the rapper 2 rom english7/10/2023 ![]() Itou: I think it all came together quite nicely. And how do you feel PaRappa came out, as a game? I feel it’s the pursuit of that experience of tension that makes a game, a game. It’s kind of similar to STG games, isn’t it? If you don’t maintain a level of enthusiasm and energy from the start, your run isn’t going to go well. When we got that part down, it gave us a swell of confidence that this was going to be a fun game, a real game. What we came to realize, is that what we really wanted was for people to be able to bring their own energy and enthusiasm to their performance, so we adopted the improvisational system. But if we went and made the hit detection too strict, that would mean most people wouldn’t be able to clear the game. You could clear the game very easily, but it had none of the tension we wanted, none of the feeling of being a musician performing on a live stage. When you play the finished game, the rhythm timing should feel pretty strict, but in our earlier betas it was far more loose and forgivable. Matsuura: I don’t want to give away everything, but basically if you don’t do your own “arrangement”, you won’t get a COOL rating. Can you tell us about the scoring system? Music was the theme, and that was the only way to go. (laughs) And I thought they were lame anyway. I didn’t want to make one of those typical CD-ROM “games” with low interactivity and lots of movies… that would have been an embarrassment. I had worked on CD-ROM software before this, so PaRappa was deliberately meant to be a challenge for myself to create an actual, clearly recognizable game. Matsuura: I wanted it to be a proper game of course. (laughs) -Were you consciously trying to make PaRappa into a “game”, or was it a more open design? Matsuura: It was more like, one day Itou was just there. Itou: Yeah, I don’t remember… who was it that decided to bring me on…? (laughs) Matsuura: No way, those were important! -Matsuura, did you bring Itou on board? Itou: I wrote the scenarios, but that’s not really related. It sounds like the development itself was a kind of rap…? (laughs) Masaya Matsuura and Gabin Itou posed with a life-sized PaRappa. ![]() It was so different from the work I did as an editor, which is about revision and rewriting, whereas this was all done with immediacy on the spot. Those sessions were really where Ryu’s performances came together. (laughs) Then Matsuura would break out his laptop and record them, and they’d work out the art there too. Ryu, the rapper, would then start freestyling lyrics in English on the spot. (laughs) Using that storyboard/screenplay hybrid, we’d write out the dialogue and the general backstory notes in Japanese. Matsuura: It was something midway between storyboarding and screenplay writing. With that, they’d start drawing pictures and storyboarding the movie scenes… Each time I wrote the story for a stage, I’d bring it to the rappers (Ryu and Matsuura), who’d then plot out my basic story on a big piece of butcher paper. Matsuura: We did have a lot of moments like that. But the way we made PaRappa actually had a lot of “live” moments, like a band writing and improvising music there on the spot. The scale of game development is so large though, that if we approached it like an editor would, not making anything final and always revising, then nothing would ever get done. It’s a given that the early drafts of any piece won’t be very good, and will need revisions all the way to the final manuscript. Itou: I was originally an editor for a magazine, which involved both writing pieces from scratch as well as editing them later. And how did you get started with this project, Itou? Perhaps another reason for my attraction to rap-and a very big one-is that I can’t rap in English at all! (laughs) I guess I had a kind of subtle mental complex about it, which made it all the more fascinating to me. It’s a genre with a high degree of interactivity. The thing with rap is, no matter where a piece goes musically, the rapping element can ride on top of that freely, unrestricted (in a good sense and in a bad sense). And rap turned out to be the most exciting music I worked with then. But crafting an actual video game out of those ideas, as I learned with PaRappa, was not as easy as I had expected.Īnyway, that’s how I got started, doing work closer to software tools than games, exposing myself to lots of different kinds of music and making CD-ROM software for computers. To be honest, that creative process is kind of like a game in and of itself. ![]() It’s extremely fun, discovering those new and unexpected twists and turns. Samplers are cool in that you start writing music with one specific idea in mind, but the sampler shows you all these possibilities you never would have thought of. But actually, a turntable is a kind of sampler! When one starts to DJ and play around with the sampler, before long you’re using it to make your own music.
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