https://pastebin.com/e8P0DURrConcept: From Mega Evolution to Dynamax
●About XY
Mega Evolution was born from the excellent concept of XY, but
I felt there were four flaws in the game design.
1) When playing alone, the game simply revolves around Mega Evolution and using moves.
2) Mega Evolution prioritizes certain Pokémon, preventing all Pokémon from taking advantage of their full potential.
3) Few trainers use Mega Evolution, which makes the game less exciting and less fitting into the world.
4) Mega Evolution requires players to hold items, making item management extremely cumbersome.
I considered these four flaws in XY's game design and used them to create the concepts for Niji and Orion.
●About Niji
Niji's concept was already well underway when we joined forces, so we weren't able to address the flaws from XY from the concept.
Mega Evolution existed, but Z-Moves hadn't yet been finalized.
We decided to proceed as much as we could,
and proceeded with resolving issues 2) and 3).
However, we ended up leaving issues 1) and 4) unresolved,
which left the project feeling like it was an incomplete work.
●About ORION
Because we were able to start with the concept for ORION, we were able to resolve all of these issues 1), 2), 3), and 4).
For 1), we limited the location so that it could only be used in boss battles, while also setting exciting points in the game.
For 2), we made it possible for all Pokémon,
and we resolved 3) in line with 1).
For 4), we were able to resolve the issue by setting it so that the item slots were not filled up.
The idea for Dynamaxing
was not a sudden idea or something we came up with based on the setting or illustrations,
but rather, we came up with the above four points as a solution to the issues we had learned from the previous game.
I think this is a good example of how new game design can be born from reflections on the previous game's design.
