Keiji Inafune Has the Best Food, Sex Metaphors

When Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune needs a metaphor, this is where he goes:

For one, competition has intensified, and furthermore, players have gotten "used to" games. To use a simple analogy, any kind of erotic picture will turn on a middle school student, right? (laughs) Oh, but it's not like that so much anymore...

Say you had a beautiful younger sister, and of course other people would say, "Your younger sister is pretty. It must be nice to live with her." But then maybe you look at her and think she's rather average? It's kind of like that. (laughs)

When he's not analogizing Capcom's business problems to junior high arousal or your little sister, Inafune illustrates his points with nattō:

So if you're starving and starving to the point of death, and before your very eyes you see nattō, which you absolutely hate. "Ugh, I don't eat nattō, so I won't have it." Well, then you die. If I eat nattō, I can survive. At that point, it's egotistic to say you won't eat nattō because you hate it, because you're making the mistake of putting likes and dislikes over life and death.

So if you said that nattō rolls taste great and opened a sushi bar in California that served only nattō rolls, there would be no customers. You'd have to make nattō rolls tailored to American tastes.

It's not that nattō rolls can't succeed, but if you learned from a foreign chef that it's easier for the customers to eat nattō rolls if you add squid, you'd have to make a change from what Japanese people consider nattō rolls to be. It's not that nattō is bad, so to speak.

Quotes taken from Inafune's tell-all exit interview with 4Gamer, conducted just prior to his resignation from Capcom. Translated in its entirety by user "Cheesemeister" at NeoGAF.

Image: Wired.com