The more than 100 yokai in the game are mostly based on supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore. And then there are multiple difficulty levels to try – Tanaka describes the highest setting as “very hard to beat, unless you deal with the enemies’ attacks very carefully,” to which Inaba jokes, “That’s Platinum’s vice! I wouldn’t recommend it.” Tanaka says that aiming for 100% completion will double the total play time. World of Demons is a linear, story-driven game that offers about 10-15 hours of gameplay, but players are encouraged to explore to find hidden areas, acquire new weapons and loot items, play with different characters and try new yokai combinations, with multiple side missions available for each stage that the player can tackle in any order. And of course, the controls feel good, which is something we put a lot of care into.” There’s a lot of depth but it’s easy to get into. But if you want to put in the time, there’s a lot you can do – there are multiple playable characters with unique weapons and abilities, and each one feels different to control. Tanaka explains, “What makes this a typical Platinum game is that we make it easy for an inexperienced player to understand the game through the tutorials and to easily pull off actions that look cool and are fun to do, while quickly leading them through fight after fight. As you’d expect from a Platinum title, the combat involves pulling off ever-cooler combos, rewarding split-second timing with powerful counterattacks and, of course, a grade at the end of each fight. World of Demons tasks the player with dispatching yokai in bite-size skirmishes that are well suited to playing on the move, but strung together in linear stages that allow for longer play sessions, with a boss battle at the end of each. It was a difficult challenge at first, but as time went on it became a fun problem to solve, so we feel like it was a successful attempt.” We realized that with touch control, the way we approached things like very fine control, camera movement and so on could not be implemented in exactly the same way. “But we were unsure whether we could create the same kind of experience on mobile – and indeed, when we tried to do that early on it didn't feel quite right. “Obviously it’s an action game, and in that respect it’s similar to what we’ve always made,” says Tanaka. Don't let the mobile platform scare you off – this is unmistakably a PlatinumGames joint, albeit one that was designed to make the most of the mobile platform. The game had been designed with this in mind, but Apple Arcade does not allow microtransactions at all – a condition that has undoubtedly benefited World of Demons. As a free-to-play game, the original incarnation of World of Demons offered various ways to spend money, such as paying for better item drop rates. One of the first things to go was microtransactions. It has a gorgeous ukiyo-e art style that is broadly reminiscent of Hideki Kamiya’s pre-Platinum classic Okami, and tells the tale of a samurai named Onimaru who fights yokai (Japanese folklore creatures) and liberates them from the evil subjugation of Shuten Doji, the demon king who seeks to take over the world. While the basics of the concept remain the same, the game that was released yesterday on Apple Arcade is very different to the one announced in 2018 – it has been redesigned from the ground up for Apple’s subscription service. If the name World of Demons sounds familiar, that’s because the game was previously announced in April 2018 as a free-to-play title to be published by Japanese mobile game company DeNA. IGN Japan spoke with PlatinumGames Studio Head Atsushi Inaba and World of Demons producer Koji Tanaka to find out more about the game and its fascinating development. As the studio’s first mobile game and only their second self-published title, its production was rich with new challenges. World of Demons is the new Apple Arcade exclusive title from PlatinumGames, the revered studio behind Bayonetta, NieR: Automata and The Wonderful 101.
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