My name is Jerome Collette, scriptwriter on Red Steel. I’m here today to talk a little about the game experience in Red Steel and why the Wii Pad is a central element of it.

To begin, I wanted to say that my role as a scriptwriter was to be part of the core creative team since the very beginning of the project. We worked hand in hand with the creative director, producers and level designers so that the plot, the universe and the gameplay all go in the same direction to give a consistent and interesting experience to the player.

As the game is a First Person Shooter, we needed a simple plot, understandable from the point of view of the hero and also a hero anyone could identify with. This is something really important to me as I really consider that especially in FPS it is key, that the player feel he is the hero acting.

In Red Steel, this immersion is reinforced by the use of the Nintendo controller. I had to write a story focused on it and the experience the player feels while handling it and mastering it.

That is why I came to the idea that the plot turns around a sword, the Katana Giri. The hero’s journey, trying and mastering the sword is the same as the player using and mastering the Wii Pad. The identification prevails.

And the importance of the sword/Wii Pad is reinforced by the fact that this is also the only solution to solve your problems: It’s the thing your enemies want, the only way to get back your love one.
So, you have to fight with it, you have to train, to master it and prove your skills against your enemies or in front of your mentors to progress and succeed.

Later in the game, you discover that Tokai, your enemy, wants to take the katana giri, as it represents a symbol of power inside the yakuza underground. The only way to get out of this tricky situation is then to learn how to master the sword fighting and then the Wii remote to fight back all your enemies.

As you will go through the game, you will learn how attacks and moves. So my role at this level, as a scriptwriter, was to find an exciting way to make you learn how to manipulate the Wii remote. That is to say to find a scenario that fits to this game structure. I came to the idea of having masters you can visit regularly and who will teach you new tricks. The mentors also give you all the values of a modern samurai. Among them, there are control and mastery, which are the keys to be a very good player with the Wii remote. If you control your moves, you’ll be super efficient. If you just gesticulate, it will be much harder & exhausting.

As you can see, my job is to find situations, dialogs and characters that make you live the game system as something really exciting and not artificial.

I hope you will really enjoy discovering more while playing Red Steel soon!!
Domo arigato !!

Jérôme