Sega's Binary Domain, a new shooter from Yakuza boss Toshihiro Nagoshi, was originally revealed back in January...and as much as Nagoshi would like to tell you more about the game, he can't. "To be honest, there's very little that we can actually reveal at this precise time," he admitted to Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. "There's a lot I want to talk about; it's practically all about to burst out of my mouth, but I just have to keep it all bottled up for now. All I can really say is that it's getting better by the day."
The outspoken Nagoshi may have concentrated most of his energy on the Yakuza games over the past few years, but he wants it clear that this new title borrows nothing from his past releases. "I think it'd lead to fewer misunderstandings if people thought of them as different projects," he said. "Ryu ga Gotoku Of The End was targeted first and foremost for Yakuza fans; it's easy to play for people who aren't used to gun-based action games, but you can't really call it a game for hardcore shooter fans. Binary Domain, on the other hand, is made to be easy to play for people who like shooters, although we're trying not to make it too unapproachable for beginners either."
Like a lot of shooters, Binary Domain is set in the near future -- in this case, Tokyo in the year 2080. "The fact the game's set around 70 years from now is based on something I've had in my mind for a while," Nagoshi commented. "It took about 50 years for Japan to go from losing the war in 1945 to how it's developed today, and when you think about it that way, people can change a lot in the span of 70 years. It's more than enough time for society to change, and if anything, the change is going to be a lot more rapid than what we've seen in the past 50 years. The Tokyo depicted in Binary Domain is one way the future might work out, a kind of bold expansion on the changes that are just beginning to come into play right now. We're aiming for a 2080 Tokyo that doesn't seem like a total fantasy."
It's a shooter with a deep story element, no doubt about that. "I really don't think there's been a game with this much dialogue to it," Nagoshi said. "It might wind up being the game with the greatest volume of dialogue in game history -- not that I was deliberately setting out to do that, but there's enough drama to this game that all the dialogue is necessary to portray it. That's what the scope of this game is like."
Although Binary Domain's setting isn't exactly innovative by most standards, Nagoshi remains confident that it'll succeed at telling a ripping tale. "Science fiction and shooters get combined together a lot, but if we're going to go with this theme, we definitely aren't going to make it a standard sort of story," he said. "Life is one of the major themes we explore in this game, and that's a sort of universal concept that can be expressed in a lot of different ways. I think the near-future setting will let us express that theme in a way that hasn't been done before."
