For those unfamiliar with Japanese history, does Musashi always use two swords?
Yoshimoto: Yes, he is a famous Japanese sword fighter called Musashi Miyamoto. He’s famous for using two swords. 1UP: How would you differentiate between manga shading and cel or toon shading? Fujimoto: Conventional cel shading is already used in many other games. It basically relies on calculation done by a program. Because of that, characters have a shadow below the face, which we didn’t want. Mr. Yoshimoto wanted the character’s outline to be comic-like, so we first manually drew in the outlines to some extent, then had the program itself calculates the shading. The game doesn’t totally rely on the program for the shading — we actually drew in the lines to enable outlines that have a comic-like, or pen-like, touch. 1UP: Since the game has a lot of slashing, are you worried about this being a violent game? Yoshimoto: The game is targetted at the general audience, but it’s certainly filled with exciting elements. The game itself isn’t really violent, though — we don’t have any actua
