Game Center CX Season 1 – Back to Contents
#2
Koei

Arino visits the stately game publisher Koei and talks to its cofounder and principal producer Kou Shibusawa. Shibusawa discusses his start in the industry, when he was programming on a Sharp PC in the early 80s (he even shows off the original unit!). It was then he created his first game, Nobunaga’s Ambition, and soon others on simple cassette tapes. Further discussion of Nobunaga goes on from there, including the recent massively-multiplayer sequel.

After the first part of the interview, Arino walks around the Koei campus a little bit, observing a blocked-off software development room, pumping iron at the company gym and checking out a rear courtyard that has Nobunaga’s 8-bit portrait composed of stone tiles.

For the second interview, Arino talks to Takazumi Tomoike, head of Omega Force and the big brain behind the Dynasty Warriors series. He discusses finer points of the game and its characters. Later, Tomoike and Arino engage in a Dynasty Warriors duel. Tomoike handily beats down a bewildered Arino in two rounds.

Arino moves on to talk with Koei PR woman Kazumi Matsushita, regarding Koei’s popular love adventure series for women, Angelique. Matsushita explains the series’ popularity, and also discusses the newest installment, Angelique Trois for PS2.

The second part of the Shibusawa interview rounds out the show, where the man talks about game design and his future as a designer.

Chousen

Being the Koei episode, you might think Arino would be tasked with completing something like Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Dynasty Warriors, but instead he takes… Angelique Trois. Arino vainly tries to get the innocent Angelique to score a date with the various strapping young men around the kingdom, and eventually live happily ever after. At the end, Arino is forced to choose which of the men to confess his (uh, her) love to. He chooses the guy he had a successful date with last time, but is quickly denied. Arino laughs off the bad ending, but he’s surely not without pain in his heart.