In early January, N-Sider received a chance to interview Rich Amtower, localization staff for Nintendo of America, regarding the North American release of Sword of Mana for the Game Boy Advance. The interview was conducted by N-Sider staff member, Brandon Daiker.
Q: Hi, my name's Brandon Daiker. I'm a staff writer and I head a reader interaction column at N-Sider.com. If you could go ahead and just give us a short introduction of yourself that would be good.
Rich Amtower: Alright, my name's Rich Amtower, I work at Nintendo as a localization writer and editor. Typically that means my role is to work with the translators to ensure a good decent quality translation and rewrite on the games that we work on. With Sword of Mana the localization was done entirely through Square's US localization team so my role on this one has been more marketing support but I'm pretty familiar with the game and could answer some questions about that.
Q: Ok, Sword of Mana was the remake of Seiken Densetsu, Final Fantasy Adventure, and that was originally released in 1991 for the Game Boy.
Amtower: Uh huh.
Q: Besides the new graphics, what type of other new elements have been added to the game?
Amtower: There've been pretty substantial, I guess you could call them, expansions to the storyline -- they've fleshed out the character backgrounds a lot. You see much more of both the hero and heroine's past and you see much more of their interaction and development as characters.
Q: Right.
Amtower: They've also sort of retroactively introduced some of the elements from the other Mana games like the ring command system -- the whole menu system essentially -- for swapping out, using magic spells. You'll recognize something similar to the Legend of Mana second character... have you had much of an opportunity to play the game yet or..?
Q: I actually haven't received the review copy yet or anything. Other reviews are really all I've had exposure to.
Amtower: Generally in battle you have a second character supporting you. If you're playing as the hero it's usually the heroine, if you're the heroine it's the hero. You can swap out control between the two of them but you've the most control over your primary character, being able to change their equipment, things like that. The second character is A.I. controlled and you can customize the A.I. to a certain extent -- you can tell it to do more magic attacks or physical attacks, tell it to back off or close in... um, let's see, there's much more... it didn't look like it had a very sophisticated leveling system when I first experienced the game, but as I started playing through the game I found there was a lot more to it than I thought there was. You level up your characters by spending level up points essentially in a number of different categories of character types and as you spend them more in certain types you can shape the direction of your character. Like if you spend five points in Monk for example you increase your skills with hand to hand, with uh, direct melee weapons, essentially, knuckle weapons.
Q: Are the skills separated into different job classes then?
Amtower: After a fashion. Each class has a strength I suppose you could call it... let me dig out my manual so I can get some more specific information for you but uh... um, flip flip flip (chuckle) so different classes have different skills with elemental magic for example, or range weapons, edge weapons, and as you spend points in your different classes you can get basically better abilities in those classes and better specialization with those weapons.
You'll notice at first that as you spend points, they distribute different benefits to different attributes, so your power will go up by a certain amount, your defense will go up by a certain amount. If you choose, for example, "Fighter Class", your power will go up more than your defense. If you choose um, I think it's "Thief", your defense will go up even more and your agility will go up. If you choose "Magician Class", your magic points will go up more than your hit points, and that gives you a certain amount of customization, shaping of your skills.
But then as you spend more points within a single job type, you then level up within that type, and points that you continue to spend in other types help to specialize what your abilities will be, so if you spend points in Magician you become better at magic but then if you add points to another class, you'll become better at elemental magic or a combination of weapons and magic, or defensive magic, giving you a good range of discovery cause you have to uncover these on your own, but also a fair amount of customization. The more you spend points on the things you want the more specialized your character becomes to the kind of play that you want out of the game.
Q: What would you say prompted your decision to remake the original Seiken Densetsu as opposed to any of the other Mana titles?
Amtower: The Mana series had been, I guess the last one was Legend of Mana, and the characters were pretty well received for that and when you go back to the original Final Fantasy Adventure Game Boy Mana game, it all takes place in the same timeline. They had expanded the world pretty significantly in the later games though, so this gave them an opportunity to go back and revisit those characters, really flesh out their stories and also flesh out the world as a whole. As you're playing you'll notice that some characters from Legend of Mana make an appearance in this game, uh... little cactus, Niccolo the merchant, a number of other characters, and the idea was to create a better sense of world unity so you get a good sense of continuity in the sense that all these games take place in the same universe.
Q: Was an effort made to style the graphics closely to any particular installment of the series?
Amtower: When you get a good look at the game you'll see that the graphics have the same kind of watercolor painting feel that Legend of Mana had. You'll notice some similarities in the art styles and I think that's what they were going for is another layer of unity within the game to make the games have a similar visual feel.
Q: Right. In kind of a similar vein there, how was the music handled? Was it kind of redone with the GBA audio or were new compositions made from the original?
Amtower: That I'm not entirely sure about to be honest. That's a good question, I hadn't stopped to think about that myself or to sit down with the two games side by side, um, unfortunately I don't really have a good answer (chuckle).
Q: (laugh) That's fine, that's fine. Uh, what did you enjoy most about it being developed for the GBA as opposed to the other systems out there?
Amtower: I only really ever got involved with the final product for the US market so by that time the game had essentially been completed and I was checking in on the localization phase, just sort of popping in and seeing how it was coming along, so I don't know too much about the programming end of things. All I've seen is how the story and how much work went into the localization to make it consistent with the later Mana stories and to make the characters and characterization consistent as well.
Q: I see that you worked on the North American localization of Wind Waker as well?
Amtower: Yeah.
Q: What was, what was that like working on that particular project?
Amtower: Oh, well I'm glad to say that the primary writer on that was Nate Bihldorff and he's right now the other writer/editor here. He did all the creative work and I did some of the clean-up editing at the end. I'm glad that was my role (chuckle) because Nate's got a fantastic voice for the game, first of all, and second of all, he was having fun but he was slowly going mad as well (chuckle).
Q: (laugh)
Amtower: So it was a pretty intense project for him, my role in that was thankfully, thankfully limited, heh, it was a lot of fun to work on, but it benefited greatly from having a single person driving the voice behind the game.
Q: You also did the writing and editing for the Golden Sun series, is that correct?
Amtower: Yeah, in the same way that I helped Nate out on Wind Waker, he helped me out a bit on Golden Sun, but Golden Sun was pretty much mine in the way that Wind Waker was his.
Q: He did sort of clean-up, and...
Amtower: Yeah. Uh... Golden Sun, uhm... and so it was the same sort of thing where Nate had a lot of freedom to run wild on Wind Waker, I feel like I was given a lot of freedom on Golden Sun to do characterization, world building.
Q: A while back, Brownie Brown developed a game called Magical Vacation... would there be any possibility of this title ever coming to North America?
Amtower: I don't know about that I'm afraid. I know of Brownie Brown, I remember when they split off from Square, and obviously they've been brought back to work with Square briefly again for Sword of Mana. I'm not sure what their plans are for the American release of Magical Vacation, if any, at this point.
Q: Now that Sword of Mana is finished, is there any chance of any of the past Seiken Densetsu games coming to the Game Boy Advance or possibly a new one in the series?
Amtower: That I don't know, I haven't heard of anything about that right now.
Q: Ok. What prompted the decision to rename the game Sword of Mana instead of keeping the original title?
Amtower: I'm not sure what prompted the change on the Japanese end of things... obviously Final Fantasy Adventure wasn't gonna cut it in the North American audience, but I think it may have been from a desire to sort of shift the focus and keep the... the thematic consistency of the series going, you know, Secret of Mana, Legend of Mana, Sword of Mana, at least for the North American translation of the title, and I think that the title Sword of Mana gives it a very specific focus on what you're heading toward, what your objective to the game is gonna be -- my feel for the game has been that it has a very almost a fairy tale quality to it and I'm not sure how well this is conveyed in the Japanese title but the Sword of Mana as a title conveys that same sense of sort of the implication of a larger fairytalish kind of story, and the art style and writing style support that as well.
Q: What would you say about the Mana series kind of appeals to you the most, what do you enjoy about the series personally?
Amtower: Part of it is just a matter of looks to be honest. It comes down to having a very solid sort of fairy tale feel to it, it's different than other fantasy games. You know, the sort of high fantasy, swords and sorcery stuff. It's got a slightly lighter feel, a bit more playful and that, to be honest, is what draws me to it, there's a bit of exploration, relatively arcade-y action to it, but to me the real strength of the game is the feel of the story and the feel of the artwork.
Q: Have you had a chance to look at the fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3?
Amtower: (surprised) No, I haven't.
Q: Yeah... I know there's a fan translation floating around out there, I didn't know if you had any experience with that kind of translation as compared to the other games.
Amtower: No, I've seen some fan translations in the past and been pretty impressed with the work that the fans put into it, but I've found in the past that the development team and localization teams have access to more resources that the fans don't have, like the programmers themselves.
Q: Alright, well I'd just like to thank you, Rich, for taking the time to answer our questions, we really appreciate it, and you have a good holiday.
Amtower: No problem, you too.