another CEDEC summary, this one with producer Kouichi Kawanaga and director Hiroshi Matsunaga on the conception, making and remaking of Ring Fit Adventure famitsu.com/news/202009/04…🇯🇵
this one's super interesting but super long... the gist is that Kawamoto's usual MO is hybridising two different ideas to make new ones & thus Ring Fit was being made with the concept of "fitness + RPG" but they eventually realised that by working so hard to blend the disparate…
…elements as thoroughly & unobtrusively as possible, they'd made something boring that didn't work as a fitness tool or an RPG, so they had to completely redesign the game with more concrete delineation between exercises & gamey-game stuff
I might come back to this later but I don't have time to break it down now, sorry—there are loads of pics from several early versions that are probably interesting enough on their own, including from before they devised the ring-con, so click through if you like
one other thing: Koichi Kawamoto is the guy who came up with the concept for WarioWare, led the Brain Age series & produced system-level software like 3DS Mii Plaza and Badge Arcade, and he's someone Miyamoto's singled out in interviews as one of their biggest new talents
(I say "new" but he first started singing Kawamoto's praises nearly 20 years ago... he's even admitted that all the old guard have been slow to hand over the reins and that it's kinda silly that all the "new blood" heading their studios have been around forever)
