"I see myself, within Nintendo, as sort of an outsider," says Kensuke Tanabe.
The veteran Nintendo game producer doesn't mean that he's ostracized by his fellow game creators, but that the projects he heads up can be a little weird, even by Nintendo's standards. Tanabe largely works with development teams outside Japan, heading up the production of series like Donkey Kong Country and Metroid Prime.
It was that latter series that had fans riled up at E3 Expo, and not all in a good way. The last game in the Metroid Prime series came out in 2007, and fans were sure this was the year that Nintendo would finally continue the first-person space-adventure series for Wii U. What Nintendo announced instead was Metroid Prime: Federation Force, a multiplayer game for the portable 3DS to be released next year. The fan response? A petition, currently with 20,000 signatures, to cancel the game.
Sure, the realization that Nintendo did not have a Wii U Metroid waiting in the wings is a pretty huge letdown. But why take it out on Federation Force? From talking with Tanabe at E3, one thing is clear above all else: This is a man who is passionate about Metroid Prime.
"I was trained to look at [Metroid] from a different perspective," Tanabe said. "I'd never seen anything that focused on the Galactic Federation against the Space Pirates. I thought that would be an interesting idea to explore." Most other Metroid games saw the player in the role of loner bounty hunter Samus Aran, with the wider world of the series as background dressing. With Federation Force, Tanabe wants to go into details on all that backstory.
In retrospect, Nintendo didn't do itself any favors with the way it unveiled Federation Force at E3. It took a part of the game called "Blast Ball," in which two teams of players try to shoot a giant ball into a goal (soccer with guns, basically), and presented it as one of the competitive rounds at its "Nintendo World Championships" event on the Sunday prior to E3. Days later, it revealed that "Blast Ball" was actually part of Federation Force, meaning that the World Championships competitors had been playing a new Metroid without knowing it.
Cute. But it also left everyone with the impression that the new Metroid was a competitive e-sports title. This isn't the case, Tanabe says. It's a four-player cooperative adventure that you could also play in single-player mode. It's not just about playing matches of Blast Ball for victory on the space pitch.
You'll travel to distant planets as part of the Galactic Federation. "On one of them, there will be research that the Federation has to conduct, and they get to the planet thinking it's an abandoned place that the Federation used to use before, but they find out that the Space Pirates have been using that place to plot something against the Galactic Federation," says Tanabe. "Creating the ultimate weapon."
Tanabe doesn't want the game's missions to be just a series of firefights against enemies, a la Halo. That's what he says the game's developer, Vancouver-based Next Level Games, came up with at first. "Their idea of first-person shooting games is to have a lot of targets to go through," he said. "I also wanted, instead of having an abundance of enemies to shoot around, to have more time to be able to get used to the controls."
"There's one mission where you have a railway with carts on top of it, and your mission will be to push that from beginning to end," he said. "The point of this mission will be to avoid the magnetic force against you to get the carts onward to the goal, and there you have the Space Pirates spawn to add to that, to be in your way."
"It's not just about bringing [enemies] that are clever, but also focusing on other ideas that I could implement in the game to make things a little trickier and more challenging for players to go through a single mission."
That, he said, is when Next Level had its a-ha moment: "We're not just creating a first-person shooter game, we're creating a Nintendo game."
"I personally am not very good at first-person shooters," Tanabe says. "Anyone who plays me, beats me right away. For me, it would be really hard to play in that sort of typical first-person shooting, where you have a survival mode, playing against each other."
Metroid Prime was never really a first-person shooter—more of a slow-paced adventure game about exploration that just so happened to play in first person. But when Tanabe first heard about the New Nintendo 3DS hardware, which adds a second analog joystick, he started to imagine that a game with more FPS-like could work very well on the platform. (It's also playable on the regular 3DS.)
Tanabe's desire to create a first-person shooter type game where beginners and advanced players could play together is where "Blast Ball" came from. Instead of shooting tiny moving human targets, everyone's shooting at a huge, slow-moving ball. "If you have this huge target, this huge ball in the middle of the field, it would make it easier to learn aiming and control skills," Tanabe said.
In the game's story mode, Blast Ball comes as a replacement for a standard "tutorial" type level. "I really don't like tutorials," Tanabe said. Blast Ball lets you get used to the game's controls in a fun way. Winning a game of Blast Ball is your "graduation" into the elite Federation Force squad that gets sent out on the aforementioned interplanetary missions.
Tanabe is quick to point out that he isn't in charge of all of Metroid. That's Nintendo producer Yoshio Sakamoto. So while it's still possible that a Wii U Metroid is in the offing, it just won't be from Tanabe's Prime offshoot series. (He told another media outlet at E3 that such a project would now have to be on Nintendo's upcoming NX console, as it would be too late to create it for Wii U.)
But that doesn't mean Tanabe doesn't have Metroid Prime 4 on the brain.
"Are you familiar with the ending of Prime 3?" he asks. "You might remember the scene where Samus gets on the ship and you see the planets, but after that, there's another ship that lands in that place. That was actually Sylux, who appeared in Metroid Prime Hunters. In my mind, I still have that idea where Sylux is going after Samus. So to continue that story is something I'd love to work on."
As for where Federation Force fits in, Tanabe says it's sort of like The Avengers. "Just to watch the movie Avengers to see what it's all about, I watched the single [movies] that focused on each hero," he says.
"While there has been some negative feedback," he says, "this is something that will be very important in the plot, the whole idea of the Prime universe."
"So far, all the games have been focused on you as a player being Samus," he says. "This is your first chance to actually see Samus in-game, through your own eyes. There will definitely be a chance for you to meet with her in the game."
Shouldn't Metroid fans resolve to approach Federation Force with a more open mind? Tanabe might be something of an outsider at Nintendo, and his games might not be what you expect, but there's no denying that he knows what he's doing.
"When [other Nintendo employees] see the games I create, they might be unique, and people may not agree with them," he says. But in the end, they let him run with it, because they know Tanabe delivers quality.
"Otherwise," he says, "I wouldn't be able to make games that focus on Tingle."
