ARC Live!/EP2

ARC Live! EP2 - Q&A w/ Daisuke & Mori

Feb 12, 2018

A special episode featuring BlazBlue and Guilty Gear creators/producers/directors Mori Toshimichi and Daisuke Ishiwatari.

Watch as we are joined with fighting game commentator James Chen and our very own Ninja Mikey to talk with BlazeBlue and Guilty Gear heads, Mori Toshimichi and Daisuke Ishiwatari, about their respected franchises, the fighting game community, upcoming Arc System Works titles and much more! They even discuss and answer questions from the stream chat. What other characters would they want to add to the BlazBlue: Cross Tag roster? Find out in this episode!

Notes

Q1: Favorite weapon from BBTAG?

• In BBTAG, there's lots of scythes currently.
• Ishiwatari likes Azrael's fist

Q2: Favorite GG character for Mori? Favorite BB character for Ishiwatari?

• Mori: Order Sol, May, Venom (top 3)
• Ishiwatari: before, Taokaka & Nine, more recently Hakumen

Q3: Will you be continuing Nu's story after BBCF?

• Mori has been asked a few times before, but it's tough to answer. You'll have to wait and see.

Q4: There was a BB popularity poll, did that influence [which characters got into] BBTAG?

• Mori: The top [of the poll] was very skewed, but he did feel the love in it.

Q5: Was it exciting to take UNIB into BB?

• Mori: Character design-wise, there were many flashy characters that worked off each other. The harder part was getting the balance as well as the mechanics, since it takes four different universes with different mechanics. "For me it was really easy, I just had to tell my designers what to use and to make a cool game out of it. They really took the brunt of the hardship."
• Questions about the dub will be answered on Thursday.

Q6: What inspired you to create the games that you did? Where did you get the inspiration for games like that?

• Ishiwatari: For Guilty Gear, a lot came from manga (Bastard, Dragon Ball). He tried to capture that feeling and put it into a game.
• Mori: Obviously Daisuke, since Mori used to work on Guilty Gear. But also movies and manga, like Unicorn, Zeta Gundam, and the first Mobile Suit Gundam.

Q7: Favorite RWBY character?

• Mori: It sounds standard, but Ruby; for second, Blake & Adam are tied; and also those twins in Yang's trailer.
• Ishiwatari: Ruby had a lot of impact.

Q8: Who was the hardest character to design?

• Mori: All his past traumas are coming to mind. Ragna, Litchi were really tough. In Ragna's case, he needed to look like the protagonist.
• Ishiwatari: At the copy machine there'd be a stack of papers, at the bottom is Ragna, and each one after that is a slightly different Ragna... He'd think, "when is Mori going to finish this character?"
• Mori: For Litchi... there's a lot of Chinese-inspired designs in Japanese media, and he had to consider how to differentiate her. With her breasts? But more seriously, she taught him a lot about design. He thinks that if you're designing a character to be well-received by the male audience, you should have a male designer.
• Ishiwatari: All of them...? Even though some are smoother, even during sketches they don't seem quite right, so he would redesign them often.

Q9: For Daisuke, there are many moves and move names inspired around rock bands. What about rock and roll made you draw so much inspiration from it?

• Ishiwatari: The connection was simple. He's a fan of heavy metal, a niche among niches, and he wanted more people to listen to it so he composed a lot of them and put them into the game, and named the moves after bands and music.

Q10: Is the (ASW) logo supposed to look like a slug?

• The ArcLive logo is very recent.
• It was designed by a programmer developing Guilty Gear. The intent was to have it look like a wave that can also be read as "Arc." The two dots on top represent ASW as a company and brand navigating the waves and creating new and challenging things.
• Mori thought it was a snail the first time he saw it.

Q11: Who designed Answer's business card? It's in both EN and JP.

• A unique designer called "Yankee Asano" within the company.
• There aren't any females on the Guilty Gear team.

Q12: What led you to choose who to put in to BBTAG?

• A lot of it was game balance and game system. They didn't want to skew too heavily in one or the other direction, and wanted it to be able to be enjoyed by a wide audience.
• As for characters from other licenses, they'd send them characters in a list to be whittled down, and sometimes the original studio would make specific requests. Overall, it was a combination of those two.
• For other series that might be interesting to have in BBTAG, Mortal Combat, Panty and Stocking (the Trigger anime), and Powerpuff Girls come to mind, but those would totally change the game system and art direction.

Q13: For Mori - your favorite Astral Finish?

• Is it a serious question? Then, Bang's astral. They decided they needed a shot of the fundoshi, plus a lot of artists like drawing muscles.

Q14: When the two of you play together, who wins?

• Mori won
• It reminds Mori of Bushido Blade, once you get used to the mechanics

• There will be a press event on Thursday night and Friday morning. It will not be livestreamed.

External Links

• YouTube: Part 1, Part 2