Famitsu published an interview this week with Astral Chain director Takahisa Taura, supervisor Hideki Kamiya and producer Eijiro Nishimura. Many interesting tidbits were in this interview, including first concepts for Astral Chain and the development phase.
Astral Chain was in the planning phase before development on NieR: Automata started. That puts Astral Chain in the 5 year range as a project. Nintendo contacted Platinum Games at the time to make a high difficulty game. Astral Chain was first imagined as a medieval fantasy game but Nintendo wanted a better hook as a new IP. Instead of twins in the final product, the game originally centered around triplets. Hideki Kamiya states that he might have came up with the twins concept but doesn’t quite remember.
In the original plans, Astral Chain would have had monsters that could be captured. However, Nintendo suggested to change this in order to focus on core gameplay and action. Among some of the most interesting tidbits in the article, Taura states it’s Platinum’s destiny to show off a good butt in their games. Taura is no stranger to this considering he’s worked on NieR: Automata. Kamiya is impressed with Taura’s directional duties.
Lastly, there’s a lot of post-game content after the main story. Astral Chain releases exclusively for Nintendo Switch on August 30th. Stay tuned at Final Weapon for more news regarding Nintendo Switch titles like Astral Chain!
