JUSTICE!!
-Tell us how Justice Gakuen was created!
- First, we wanted to do a polygonal fighting game in 60 FPS. When I joined the Star Gladiator team as a planner, it was already decided it would run at 30FPS, because of the extra effects and the background. But you can barely call a 30FPS game a fighting game, so our game was going to be first and foremost 60 FPS. Then, it was going to play on a 2D plane. At that time, it wasn't called Justice Gakuen yet, it was called JUSTICE FIST.
- .... what?
- And the story was about the strongest martial artists in the world gathering for a tournament. Mufufu.
- How original!
- And when I showed the working document to the older employees, they just said "BO-RING".
- Ahahahaha !
- That made me think. I wanted the game to sell. A lot. So I looked for a theme that would pick the interest of everybody. And everyone has gone to school! So I moved the action to a high school setting, so more people could relate. And then the game would be very light-hearted and silly: the class president would be decided by a fist fight! We'll have 40 characters! And so on, and so on.
But it started to be unfocused, so I paused to think. When suddenly one of the programmer shouted "Hey, look on screen! We can have 3 characters at once! 3!!!" which immediately led to the double team moves (since these animations are 2 characters hitting 1 character). That created a strong commercial hook for the game.
And since it had become a team battle game, we decided to make it a battle between schools. Then, the topic moved to "the story will be about beating an evil school!" "I love sports manga, let's make one school that would be all about that!" and so onn. I took inspiration from my own high school to make the Taiyô Gakuen.
Finally, we wanted to keep the idea of "school" in the title, but we also wanted to keep the original root of Justice Fist.
So, Justice Gakuen.
It sounds silly, which is just right with the atmosphere we were aiming for.
Since we were making a school story, we needed a female teacher in a white blouse. Hideo was a character that Akiman had drawn for another project, so we asked him if we could use him for our game. Batsu was originally from a ninja school, which is why he still wears a chain mail under his school uniform.
We needed more female characters as well. It's now quite common, but at the time it was quite strange to have a team of two guys and one girl. We could get away with it because of the whole "team battle in high school" setting.
Finally, we worked on the story. We wanted the stories of all characters to cross with each other, and they would unfold in several directions, with several different endings.
And we really, really didn't want the game to fail, so we asked for Sakura to be in the game. She had a school uniform, that was enough.
- She was a sort of insurance policy!
- Exactly! Also, we liked Ibuki's school uniform in SF3, so we asked if we could use it for Hinata (which makes Ibuki a student of Taiyô Gakuen!). That was another sort of insurance policy. See, it's the same!
We had some trouble with the hardware to have long hair and tight skirt (Mrs Kyôko) and wobbling boobs (Tiffany), but we did our best and it worked!
And also, the opening was also a first in the industry: an anime using a palette of 256 colors!
Well, only 3 drawings actually. But it was a first! Can you imagine how powerful the Playstation hardware was!!!
-I was a student myself when the game was released, and even my friends who didn't play videogames liked Justice Gakuen. When they didn't know who to pick, I just said "use Gan". He was strong, after all.
- Why Gan of all characters...?
We really created the game to make it as easy to get into as possible. The setting, using only 4 buttons... Since we were building it with the PS1 port in mind, we reduced the number of buttons from the very start. Then, the commands were very easy and lenient, so that anyone could perform combos, or counter attacks... And the team attack was simply "press 3 buttons". AND you started the round with a full gauge, to encourage players to use our killer feature from the very beginning of the round. It also allowed the rounds to end quicker, which means the income in the arcades was very good. That's the reason why the "full gauge from the start" was later used in Zero 3. They even came to our desk to ask if it was OK to include it in their game as well!
Then, one day, Funamizu came to me and said "we'll make the consumer version of Justice Gakuen our main release of the summer, but you need to sell a million minimum". And we had only 3 months to make the home version...
So we thought about what we could reasonably do in 3 months. And the answer was the 熱血青春日記.
We had an extremely short time to do it, but it allowed the game to be popular with people who didn't care for fighting games. I'm very happy we made it! Our secret hope was that players who didn't play fighting games would buy the game for the dating sim, and after playing it for a while they would have learned the bases of fighting games and be able to play them!
- I loved the tests that you had to pass with Hayato at the end of each semester! It mixed with the flow and the setting of the game very naturally, and it forced you to become better without knowing it!
- We wanted everyone to do their best to date Natsu, so they would have to do a little effort in order to get her. Or make Bowman blush. And ultimately, you would end up with a character that could do a screw pile driver and a shin shoryuken at the same time!
- You could not only chose which school to go to, but also change your appearance. You learned your moves naturally during your high school everyday life!
- I like to create stuff, not only in videogames, so I love games where you can edit and create your own thing. I think it was an inspiration for Dragon's Dogma later on...
- To finish this interview: when will you make a sequel to Justice Gakuen?
- If I could decide, I would make one right now! I really want Batsu, Kyôsuke and Hinata to have their graduation ceremony. The series ended when they started their 3rd year...
- When I was working under you, you would often come to my desk to talk about Justice Gakuen, and how the scenario was already ready...
- It's true! The scenario is ready since the year 2000! People should start a twitter campain #WewantJusticeGakuen3 ＃ジャスティス学園3制作希望 !
- Thank you for your time. In the end, we mostly talked about Justice Gakuen... Maybe one day we'll do another interview to talk about Power Stone of Capcom vs SNK!
