Q&A

The voice recognition feature – did it work in Japanese?

Yes, it works in Japanese, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish – it should work. But it was not well made [laughs].

When you started making Binary Domain, it was an interesting time for Japanese games. You certainly weren’t the only studio tr ying to appeal to western players by making a game in a popular western genre.

Well, yes. A long time ago, around the PlayStation 1 or 2 era, Japanese titles sold really well in the overseas market. But I think in the middle of the PlayStation 2 era or so, companies in the west started releasing a lot of high-quality games, and Japanese titles started not selling so well in the US and Europe as they had in the past. So we all felt that we wanted to push Japanese titles back into the overseas market again.

The game very effectively tells a human story with robots, and one of them was particularly popular with players. Can you tell us how you developed the character of Cain?

[laughs] OK, well, it is a French robot. And as a character, it is like a butler. I just thought it would be interesting to have someone like that in the game [laughs].

Could we have a spinoff game that's entirely about Cain?

So the robot is the main character, right [laughs]?

Yes. You could make it in the Dragon engine.

It could be interesting: Cain knows he is a robot but tries to make friendships, and struggles with relationships. It’s not about racism, but I think the robots would be discriminated [against] so there would be a conflict. But that kind of thing is something Japan has been doing for a long time, ever since Astro Boy.