Dreaming Up A New Mario RPG

A few weeks ago, Nintendo invited me to their New York City offices for a video conference with the folks at AlphaDream, the game studio behind all of the Mario & Luigi games so far, including Dream Team, which came out on August 11 for the 3DS.

This is what I saw:

On the top left is Nate Bihldorff (grey shirt), who wrote the English script for Dream Team. Sitting next to him are two translators that helped me communicate with the Japanese developers on the call. They’re at Nintendo of America’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

On the bottom left is Nintendo producer Akira Otani, along with someone else off-screen who didn’t identify himself, conferencing in from Nintendo’s HQ in Kyoto, Japan.

The top right gives you a glimpse at an AlphaDream conference room in Tokyo. On the left side of the room is Yoshihiko Maekawa, a producer on Dream Team. Kubota is the one in the orange shirt. They’re two of AlphaDream’s top people, and they helped make Dream Team what it is.

“I guess one way I can sort of encapsulate the journey on production of this game was thinking about all the different iteration we did for ideas with Luigi,” said Kubota. “This is something that changed as the platform that we were developing for changed. You know we moved to new hardware over the course of the project, and suddenly found ourselves able to express ourselves with a greater level of richness and detail and processing power.”

It’s a big shift—the 3DS is significantly more powerful than the DS—and the results are pretty impressive. Dream Team looks great.

There have been four Mario-and-Luigi-helmed role-playing games so far, all made by the folks at AlphaDream. Each has some sort of big hook or gameplay gimmick: the last time around, the adventurous plumbers found themselves inside of Bowser, where they could manipulate his body by clearing enemies out of his various passages. On the top screen, you’d control Bowser; on the bottom screen, you’d control Mario and Luigi.

Dream Team has a new type of gimmick: you, as Mario, get to explore Luigi’s dreams. When Luigi is snoozing, he can do all sorts of insane things that mostly involve splitting into multiple Luigis and combining to form shapes and weapons.

“When we hit upon the idea of having a lot of the gameplay action set in a dream, I think that’s when it all came together and started to make sense for us,” Kubota said. “But that was quite the process—it was a journey.”

The team started working on the game in 2009, just after releasing Bowser’s Inside Story. It was a long, excruciating process, they say.

“I think we had quite a few restarts with this game—maybe as many as seven,” said Otani. “But I think that is what brought us to the wonderful product that we have.”

That’s what they did for Dream Team—some of the time. Often, when entering a new dungeon or screen on the map, you are accosted by someone and explicitly told what to do next. It can get a little grating.

“It’s certainly something we are thinking about, and struggling to find new ideas for constantly,” Otani said. “We want to see how this current iteration goes and make sure we’re always making the effort to present game systems to players in a way that’s easy to understand. The real danger here is that people find the game difficult and as a result start to wander—that’s when you lose players as well.”

Like Pulling A Mustache

It’s interesting, watching Nintendo’s Otani interact with the AlphaDream folks—even from our brief conversation, I could tell that there’s something of a tug-of-war there. I asked what the collaboration process was like: does AlphaDream ever want to do things that are rejected by the folks who pay the bills?

They laughed.

“Of course these guys come up with all sorts of very interesting ideas,” said Otani, “and at some point someone at Nintendo has to express a judgement on them one way or another.”

In other words, AlphaDream is the freewheeling loose spirit, and Nintendo has to pull the reins every once in a while.

“Since this is such a longrunning series and we have such a deep working relationship with Nintendo at this point, we’ve gotten to the point where we have almost an intuitive sense of how they will react to certain ideas that we propose,” said Kubota, laughing, “and exactly how far we can push forward the outer boundary of those ideas every single time. And I like to think that we are always testing them a little bit with each new project and its new set of ideas. We want to slowly tickle and expand the area that we are given to work with these characters.”

“Yes, I want to emphasize that working together is the important part of that sentence,” added Otani, laughing.

“It’s a little bit like the way that we are teasing Luigi’s mustache,” said Maekawa, referring to the way you can yank and prod at the green plumber’s facial hair while he’s asleep in Dream Team

“You have to know exactly how much you can get away with. And that for us is the trial each time.”