What does it take to make a great video game? That’s a question that many have asked for years, and answers aren’t as easy to come by as you might think. After all, you can have a great team that wants to make something great, but if the people at the very top of the publisher you’re working for don’t let you make what you want, then you have no shot. Other times, you take a shot in the dark at something you hope people like, and either it works or it doesn’t. Hideki Kamiya has never been afraid to take risks when it came to the games he made, and that unintentionally led to him making one of his favorite franchises.
During a special Q&A on his YouTube channel, Hideki Kamiya talked about Hideaki Itsuno, who worked with him during Kamiya’s Capcom days and was in charge of the Devil May Cry franchise. Itsuno was in charge of the second game, but it didn’t go well at all. Thus, while the third one was in the works, he went to Kamiya for advice:
“Since I wasn’t the director, I could say whatever I wanted without any real responsibility. There’s something that really stuck with me… Itsuno said to me, ‘only Kamiya can get away with stuff like that. If we do the same, fans would get mad.”
Kamiya noted that Itsuno was a bit gun-shy, no pun intended, because he didn’t want the third game in the franchise to flop like the second one did. Yet, instead, it became one of the best action games around, and that led Kamiya to go full-tilt with some of the next games he made.
“When I saw it, I thought ‘damn, this is awesome’, it really fired me up. I was like, ‘there’s no way I’m losing to that’, it really lit that competitive fire within me. If Itsuno hadn’t created DMC3 and DMC4, there would have been no Bayonetta.”
The irony there is obvious for those who played the games with Dante and Bayonetta. Many feel that they are “reflections” of each other in many respects, and as such, they helped make things all the more fun with their titles. Bayonetta would go on to have three action-packed games herself before Kamiya left to form his own studio. He did have ideas for more, though, and you have to wonder if he might get “inspired” to do something else if another “event” like what happened before repeats.
