PALGN: Please introduce yourself, and your position at Ninja Theory
Nina Kristensen: My name is Nina Kirstensen and I am one of the co-founders of Ninja Theory, and I am the CDN, the Chief Development Ninja.
PALGN: Chief Development Ninja, that sounds like a pretty cool title…
NK: It is, yes, one of the advantages of having your own company. You can make up whatever silly title you like.
PALGN: Could you give us a quick history behind Ninja Theory?
NK: I set up a company called Just Add Monsters with Mike Ball and Tameem Antoniades back in early 2000. We developed Kung Fu Chaos for Microsoft as an Xbox exclusive. About four years ago, we started working in Heavenly Sword. Along the way, we’ve been acquired, we went bust, we were part of a buyout and eventually we reformed as Ninja Theory.
Goddess of War?
PALGN: Please give a brief synopsis on what Heavenly Sword is, particularly for those who’ve been hiding under rocks.
NK: Heavenly Sword is a game set up in the Ancient East. It tells the story of a young woman, Nariko. Her clan are the guardians of the Heavenly Sword and they have a prophecy that foretells the coming of a mighty warrior that will take up the Sword and save the people from their darkest hour. Unfortunately for everyone, a girl is born and this is a disaster – as there won’t be this mighty warrior. So, Nariko grows up with this dark omen over her head. Twenty or so years later, along comes King Bohan who is decimating the land in order to obtain the Heavenly Sword. In a moment of desperation, Nariko takes up the sword to take revenge. However, the sword is too powerful for a mere mortal, so it’s killing her while giving her immense power. One of the nice things in the game, you actually begin by dying on the battle field and then you relive the last five days of your life, to try and change your destiny.
PALGN: Were there any other particular inspirations behind the game?
NK: We were inspired predominantly by film. There is a genre called wuxia, that includes films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. Basically, really big, epic dramas with fabulous martial arts. Visually, they’re very beautiful with strong colours and stylings. That’s probably the biggest inspiration behind the game.
PALGN: A lot of people compare Heavenly Sword to “God of War with a chick”, do you agree with this? Has the game been influenced by it?
NK: It’s an interesting thing actually, God of War is not bad company to be in, but I think that players are going to get a very different experience with Heavenly Sword. It’s a big story about revenge and redemption, that carries you all the way through, and if you look at the style of combat, it’s all about elegance and beauty, almost like a ballet. With the three stances, I think you get an awful lot of depth that you just don’t see anywhere else.
Line them up, knock them down.
PALGN: In terms of the combat, some people have passed it off as a button masher, could you please give your take on the combat system? Are they looking at the game the wrong way?
NK: The combat system is really important actually, as the Heavenly Sword is the most important weapon in the game. You’ve got the three stances, so there are the three different ways to use the sword – power, speed and range. Speed stance has the double swords, it’s the fastest, most complex and deepest of the stances, complete with deep combos, block-breakers, counters, evades and so on. The second stance is power, where the swords combine into one single giant sword, and as the name suggests, it’s the most powerful of the stances but it’s also the slowest. So, you’d want to be using that against the bigger, slower characters. The third stance is range and this is where the blades come out on chains. It’s meant for pushing people back, but it’s also the weakest of the stances.
You can switch stances mid-combat. So you can start of in a ranged stance and then switch mid-combo into a power finisher. The other thing about the combat system is that you need to understand the stances to know how the blocking system works. If someone attacks you with a speed attack, you need to be in a speed stance to block it. If you’re in any of the other stances, you are going to get hit. So understanding the stance system, how to switch and how to employ it is really crucial to playing the game.
The counter system has two levels to it. You’ve got a general counter and a kill counter. If you time the counter just right, you’ll know that you’ve done it because you go into the ‘cool cam’. That’s where the camera spins around and really focuses in on the action and you get a really cinematic moment in the combat itself.
PALGN: At the most recent PAUSE event, you gave a lot of time to the work that you did with Andy Serkis, do you think the game would have reached the same level without it?
NK: Andy was really crucial to the whole process. He plays King Bohan really magnificently. More importantly, he is our Dramatic Director and he’s involved in the casting process, which was quite extensive. He worked with all the actors at workshops and rehearsals, to build up and develop their characters. In retrospect, the character that we wrote for King Bohan was quite ordinary to be honest. He was a regular evil guy. When Andy got on board, he thought really carefully about this character. He made Bohan funny and gave him depth, and really made him into an interesting character. Bohan is a maniac really, he’s committing genocide but he thinks he’s doing good work, saving the world and unifying everyone. He’s been able to make Bohan and the other characters much more well rounded and interesting.
PALGN: Heavenly Sword is certainly a good looking game, what do you attribute this to?
NK: Thank you very much. Ambition, we wanted to make something that was ground breaking from the very beginning. We worked very hard to make it visually dramatic. We made choices, like almost all of the game is played in sunlight, which is not something that your really see in games all that much. So we spent a lot of time in the atmospherics in the game, for example, we used light scattering. Depending on the time of day, you could see different haze and effects through out the game and we use things like auto exposure. So, if you’re in a room, you’ll see a door way and if it’s sunny outside, it will be really bright and when you go through, the auto exposure will kick in, just like in film. There’s lots and lots of techniques we’ve used in the game, to make it feel beautiful.
The ideal woman?
PALGN: Heavenly Sword not just about wielding a sword as Nariko, could you give us a quick overview of what other styles of gameplay there are?
NK: As Nariko, you can also make use of projectile weapons, so, bazookas (apparently they did have bazookas in the Ancient East). When you fire it and hold down the button, you can follow the projectile and control where it goes using the six-axis. You can pick up and throw just about everything in the game, smash up anything. You can pick up the enemy weapons and use it against them. Even the corpses, you can grab them and lob them at oncoming enemies.
There is a secondary playable character, which is Kai, and that’s Nariko’s younger adopted sister. She’s actually one of my favourite younger characters. She’s a very charming little character who is quite cat-like in how she moves and she can leap over everything. Most importantly, she wields a rapid fire cross-bow. And again, with her you can use aftertouch and follow the arrows as they’re shot. Which is cool for headshots and comedy groin shots and all these kinds of shots.
PALGN: Does it concern you that people are unhappy with the game’s length? Or would you tell them that the experience in Heavenly Sword would have been diminished if more fluff was added?
NK: I would hate to have it out like that, our main focus was on quality. I also wanted people to finish the game, to have the whole story. But yeah, it’s definitely all about quality to me.
PALGN: So you’d prefer to make a shorter game that’s absolutely tops as opposed to a longer game that has potentially boring bits in the middle.
NK: Definitely, yeah, absolutely.
PALGN: At the end of the games development, was the team satisfied with the final product? With the benefit of hindsight, was there anything in particular that they felt they could have improved upon?
NK: You're always most picky about your own stuff, of course you are. When we first conceived the idea, we were like, “Yes! We’ll do everything!”. We’ll have multiplayer, online, we’ll have absolutely everything you can. Though it was really early on, when we said that we can’t do everything well. So we’re going to focus on this one experience and we want to do it as well as we can. So it’s the single player experience through the big story where all the focus went. I think we made a really good choice. In the future, we explore the other things the next time around. And when we do, we’ll focus on making them as good as we can.
Yeah, not bad.
PALGN: How much of the PS3 power is the game utlilising?
NK: That’s a really good question. I think we did really well, I think that we pushed the PS3 really hard, this time round. I think in the future we’ll be able to get even more out of it. Everything that we’ve learned this time around, we’ll be able to use it better next time round. So for the future, it’s going to be really interesting and exciting.
PALGN: How was the team's experience with the PS3 hardware?
NK: We really like the PS3, but what you need is a bunch of really clever programmers who can get close to the hardware and work out how to use it. If you treat it right, you’re going to get a huge amount out of it.
PALGN: Speaking of the future, are there any plans for a sequel? Or downloadable content?
NK: There is nothing announced as yet, I’m afraid. I can say that when we originally pitched the idea of Heavenly Sword to Sony, we did write it as a trilogy. We’d be very keen to see that through, but we’ve got nothing announced yet.
PALGN: So currently Ninja Theory are weighing up their prospects for their next project?
NK: Absolutely.
PALGN: Are you a gamer yourself? If so, what are you currently playing?
NK: I have not had a chance to play anything for ages, unless you count my ongoing love affair with LocoRoco. I am looking forward to Assassin’s Creed and I’ll actually have some time to play it when that comes out.
PALGN: Thank you very much for your time
NK: My pleasure!
The full review for Heavenly Sword can be found here.
PALGN would like to thank Nina Kristensen for her time and Rebecca Rice at Sony
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