Part 13: (Kojima's Comments)

Time for some more of...


Kojima's Comments


The exaggeration of Japanese culture



There are several things in Hojo's study that exemplify some Western interpretations of different aspects of Japan. They're the kinds of things you see in Western paintings and in translations of Japanese novels, for example. It might seem weird to Japanese people, but this is something I wanted to explore. Things like a floor with coated tatami mats, shoji glass, the Buddhist altar... Tokugawa, a globalized Japanese conglomerate, controls the colony, and this creates a new form of Japanese culture. Kind of like an extension of how some Westerners put mayonnaise on sushi.


The Tokugawa Building



The lobby of the Tokugawa Building is a symbol for the massive entity into which Tokugawa has grown.

There's an atrium, a suit of armor, a sword, and photographs of its history on display. It's this sterile environment with nobody in it except for the attractive receptionist. The displays, the reception area, the colors -- that's all there to emphasize their power.



I had the receptionist sit there half-naked to illustrate how that power enables them to deviate from conventions. It's not supposed to be some futuristic costume, but instead something that makes you say, "What kind of guy is this Tokugawa if he forces the receptionist at his headquarters to wear something this revealing?"

I was originally going to have the monitors behind the receptionist run various commercials, but memory constraints forced us to drop that. In the PC-98 version they display the building in west Kobe where the Policenauts team worked at the start of development.


And now another word from our old friend Mr. Okamura.


Okamura's Comments


The music data



The amount of storage space taken up by music data is surprisingly big. Hojo's CD rack has some 50 songs on it, so as you would expect it really taxes the game CDs. (This area of the game uses one-sixth of the total data on the CDs. That's the equivalent of about 100 floppy discs!) The storage calculations gave us problems throughout development. Reducing the number of CDs you can listen to was the first thing we were going to do if necessary, but we were able to avoid that in the end.

It's fun to listen to all the unused tracks you can find here as well.