Posted By: Shrygue
via Computer and Video Games
It all started when Dead or Alive mastermind Tomonobu Itagaki started talking about Sony's PS3 stunner, Heavenly Sword...
Things were going well when "I've never played a good game where the developers put a big icon of the button you're supposed to press onscreen," popped out of Itagaki's mouth during an EGM interview. He then followed up with "I look at Heavenly Sword and it seems really half-assed, because it's asking you to do all these button-timing sequences but you are not getting much payoff from it."
He may have a point but we didn't have a problem with those similar action sequences in the mighty God of War games. In fact, we kind of liked them...
But Heavenly Sword producer Kyle Shubel wasn't going to let Itagaki get away with it and came back with: "My response to Mr. Itagaki would be that the intent of the Hero sequences is to empower the player to experience events that would be nearly impossible to play in a natural platforming state... for example, making the player run down ropes, leaping from rope to rope as they're being cut from underneath you, all while dodging other objects - that would be a frustrating experience to 99 percent of our users if we were to force them to do that manually."