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Devil May Cry 3, 1, 4, 2 Graphic Arts Interviews: Pages 11 & 12

Mission 4: The Scenario Writer Who Weaves The Story:

Bingo Morihashi has worked as a novelist, scenario writer, and manga artist. Here, he shares with us a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the main characters in “Devil May Cry 2”, “3”, and “4”.

From Planner To Scenario Writer: Bingo-san, how did you come to be involved with the “Devil May Cry” series [hereinafter referred to as “DMC”]?

Bingo: I was doing my training after being hired at CapCom, wondering what team they’d put me on, and that first team just happened to be the “DMC 2” one. Development had actually been going for a while, though. The story, characters, and designs were all pretty much in place. Only the gameplay was left, and they used all sorts of people to finish it up. I was one of those people, so I got assigned various odd jobs. [laughs] I reviewed finished assets, oversaw the translation, and those sorts of things.

You were a planner, right? Was writing that column on the official site part of your job as a planner too?

Bingo: Yes. That’s the kind of thing they make newbies do a lot…the work no one else wants to do. [laughs] But my background was in writing anyway, so it makes sense that they made me write the instruction manual, for instance.

You’d already written things before joining CapCom, right?

Bingo: The debut of my first book was scheduled about a year in advance of me joining CapCom. I received a literary prize, and my book came out immediately before I was hired. I mentioned it in my interview, even, saying that I wanted to do both jobs at once. They said, “You’re free to try, but that doesn’t seem possible. You won’t have the time.” [laughs] Even so, I wrote whenever I could in secret. [laughs]

Your most famous work, “Tokyo Shimatsumou”, came out before joining CapCom, right?

Bingo: The first volume, “Hitsuji no Uta”, did, yes. The second, “Tsuki ni Hoeru”, was written around the time I started coughing up blood during “DMC 2”. I was only sleeping two hours per night. Honestly, “DMC 2” was really stressful and I needed a way to vent. [laughs] Not being able to work on anything else was so upsetting. I was living close to the company, so I’d get home around dawn, bathe, change clothes, and then head right back. I was practically sleeping at work so I wouldn’t be late. [laughs] I’d even take naps during lunch breaks. I’ve been involved in “DMC 2” through “4”, but the year or so that I spent on “DMC 2” was by far the hardest. [laughs] Seriously…

So design and characters took precedence, even with the gameplay unfinished?

Bingo: That’s right. The stages were mostly there, but not the missions. That was my starting point. It was like we had all the trappings done, but not the filling, which made things very hard. It was around that time that Itsuno-san [Hideaki Itsuno; Director of the “DMC 2”, “3”, and “4”] became the director and started planning a complete overhaul. Itsuno-san actually wanted to make it an original, non-“DMC” title, but his involvement with “DMC 2” led to “DMC 3” and “4”, so he never got to do what he wanted. [laughs]

The “DMC 2” team members mostly came from fighting game backgrounds, right?

Bingo: The core staff members were people with arcade expertise. Industry-wise, plans for “DMC 2” began at a time when arcade games were on the decline. That was shortly before “DMC (1)” was completed, so most of the “DMC (1)” team members were absent from “DMC 2”.

The story of “DMC 2” was already largely in place, but did you get to tinker with it at all?

Bingo: All I got to do were subtitles. They were already at the point of translating the script, so no more changes could be made. The stages and bosses were already done, so making any alterations at that point would have been difficult. I believe the story of “DMC 2” was outsourced to a non-company writer, so I’m not sure how it ended up like it did. Once we got that scenario, I was told that I could fine-tune it as long as the changes weren’t big ones. So I augmented some dialogue here and there. I was careful not to go overboard, given that it was still my first year at the company. [laughs] Still, I wasn’t sure quite how far I was allowed to go.

Did your involvement in “DMC 2” lead directly to “DMC 3”?

Bingo: Itsuno-san basically said, “Let’s do ‘DMC 3’!” and everyone gradually started getting to work on it. There was no doubt that he wanted Nara-san [Hiroyuki Nara; part of the “DMC 2”, “3”, and “4” teams] and those other guys as his starting lineup. Employing people outside the company and dealing with that sort of correspondence would simply have taken too much time, so I was given my job on “DMC 3” mostly because they were trying to keep the staff limited to company employees. The team also wished that they could have been more involved in the scenario of “DMC 2”, which led to the “Let’s do it right this time” attitude in “DMC 3”.

You also wrote a website column for “DMC 3”, so does that mean you were still officially a planner?

Bingo: In name only. [laughs] My title the whole time was indeed “planner”, but Itsuno-san once remarked, “Bingo’s value to the team is completely different depending on whether he’s doing planning work or scenario work”. [laughs] To be sure, I was never a fan of working as a planner. [laughs] In “DMC 3”, they initially had me doing enemy movements and picking stages, but at one point I said, “I’m not that great at this planning work, and I find myself pulling overtime in order to polish the script.” “Great. Then just take care of the script” was the answer I got, and that’s how I wound up doing scenario work and nothing but. That was in the latter half of development, though. When it came time for “DMC 4”, I didn’t do any planning work at all.

Can you talk about you involvement with “DMC 4” a bit?

Bingo: “DMC 3” sold pretty well, and the gameplay and scenario were generally well-liked by the players, so “DMC 4” was green-lighted without much discussion, as was my own involvement with it. With “DMC 4”, I was only assigned scenario work. That alone didn’t provide much to do, though, so I was also put in charge of some other projects. There were actually a number of people at CapCom who specialized in writing, and they had formed their own “Scenario Division”, kind of like the “Design Divisions” of yore. They would take contracts for various scenarios and scripts, operating like a company within a company. They asked me to join, and we met, but then I realized that we were all way too individualistic. [laughs] A lot of people who end up becoming writers just aren’t good at cooperating with others. [laughs] Work orders came by word-of-mouth, too, because there was nothing official about the setup. Everyone just received their own work and did their own work, and there was no sense that the group functioned as a team. [laughs] I didn’t have any connections to start with, and my only experience was with the “DMC” teams, so I never got any work orders. [laughs] That’s why I told Itsuno-san that the whole “writer team” thing wasn’t really working out and that I’d probably be quitting CapCom. [laughs] He told me that they could always outsource work to me, so once the “DMC 4” scenario was finished, I quit. I also had my own books to work on, so I think it was the right decision. However, they were lacking manpower for the rest of “DMC 4”, so I kept helping out for about another year. I worked on the controller rumble feature for when enemies appear during cutscenes, because incidentally, the tools for doing that were the same ones used to implement subtitles. So they asked me to do both. [laughs]

So you were the only one officially in charge of the scenario for “DMC 4”?

Bingo: Right. I was alone on “DMC 4”, whereas with “DMC 3”, everyone discussed it together. There was this real desire to do it right, so I got together with the people at Links (who made the cutscenes) and film director Shimomura [Yuki Shimomura; a famous action movie director] to craft the scenario. It took about a year.

Secrets Behind The Series’ Characters: What sort of impressions have the “DMC” series’ characters left on you? Let’s start with Dante.

Bingo: I worked on three whole games in the series and I still can’t get a read on Dante. He wasn’t a character that I originally created, so I’d always doubt myself when writing his dialogue, wondering if it really fit him. [laughs] The character really takes after Kamiya-san [Hideki Kamiya; known for the “DMC” series]. There’s this strange, incredibly strong aura to him, but he’ll never really open up. [laughs] That’s the kind of character Dante is. Players have mentioned that the Dante in “DMC 3” seems different, but that’s because he’s less “Kamiya’s Dante” and more a product of the entire team’s will. They used the “DMC (1)” Dante as inspiration, but there was really no way to surpass what Kamiya-san had created. The way Dante goes up against the world alone makes him an awesome character in my eyes.

How about Trish?

Bingo: I feel the same way about her as I do with Dante from “DMC (1)”. Her inclusion in “DMC 4” was mostly fanservice. She would have had more of a place if the whole story was Dante’s story, but it’s not. It’s Nero’s.

What about Lucia, the heroine of “DMC 2”?

Bingo: “Not bad, I guess” is about how I would sum her up. [laughs] I expected her to get friendlier, but she always remained cold and distant. Maybe because I never wrote any of her lines? I feel the same way about Matier.

Can you talk about Arius?

Bingo: I remember a lot of the “DMC 2” team members being quite pleased with Arius. [laughs] There’s just something cool about him. People thought it was neat to have a CEO as the villain. He also serves to keep “DMC 2” grounded as more of a contemporary drama. “DMC (1)” was supposed to be that, but it ended up having more of a “fantasy world” feel, yeah? You fight in Western-style houses and the only human-ish character is Trish. In “DMC 2”, Lucia and Matier are also part of that fantasy element. Arius, on the other hand, is a symbol of high contemporary culture, and he really inspired me when it came to the stories that would come after. I was in charge of the scenario for the “DMC” anime, and you have some very grounded characters in that, like your average bar girl and gangsters. Those types don’t appear in the games at all, but Arius was all the hint I needed that going in that direction might be a good idea. “DMC 2” was important for the role it played in establishing the “DMC” series in a contemporary setting.

How about Vergil?

Bingo: He was a character with no pre-existing design, so I worked on him from scratch and consequently gave him a lot of consideration. Team members would often say, “That Bingo sure does love Vergil.” I decided to give him a katana because we already had Yamato to work with; the idea of selecting a Japanese katana as a weapon as his weapon came about because of the pre-existing Yamato. I had already proposed the idea of a character who didn’t use guns, but my reasoning at the time was pretty weak at best, citing observations like, “People like that sort of thing, right?” I’m glad I got a chance to create Vergil’s character in a sense, but he wouldn’t have made a good protagonist. Already having Dante was really a prerequisite for creating Vergil, so much so that if you told me to write a scenario starring Vergil, I’d flat-out refuse…because he’s not exciting. [laughs] In “DMC 3”, I wanted to exemplify that contrast between the dumb little brother and the cool older brother (Vergil is older by several hours).

What about Arkham and Jester?

Bingo: I said that Vergil had no pre-existing design, but his name actually was dropped in “DMC (1)”, which at least provided a jumping-off point for designning him. Arkham, Lady, and Jester, on the other hand were completely original characters, which made them difficult. [laughs] Arkham and Jester are the same person, but that wasn’t always the case. Jester was originally going to be Arkham’s subordinate, but that option wound up being too complicated gameplay-wise. Jester’s lines were essential to the story, though, so after much deliberation, someone proposed making the two characters into one, and Arkham was modified into a character capable of putting on such a performance. Without that change, Arkham would have been a fairly boring bad guy. By making him Jester, we got to enjoy Lady’s line, “Father, why would you do such a thing?” even more. [laughs] Because it’s really a gruesome performance that he puts on. [laughs] I really think the addition of Jester makes Arkham into a full-bodied character. By adding that lecherous nuance to his ordinarily serious face, you get a fascinating character. You can’t help but chuckle upon learning his secret, given how serious he is otherwise. Arkham’s attempt to gain demonic powers failed, so he really isn’t all that powerful; transforming is pretty much all he can do. I wanted to show Jester turning into Arkham in real-time in the second half of the game, but technical limitations made that impossible. With the technology available today, I think that one spoiler-filled cutscene near the end of the game would be made very differently. Jester was also given heterochromia, just like Arkham.

Can you talk about Arkham’s daughter, Lady?

Bingo: I really like her. We originally planned to have her be older than Dante; that’s how I would have liked it. [laughs] But Itsuno-san said, “No way.” [laughs] He wanted a character that would go over well with the Japanese audience. My original proposal was a cigarette-smoking demon hunter who could act like a mentor to Dante, but Itsuo-san’s response was, “No way. The only way she’ll be popular with the Japanese audience is if she looks like a high-schooler.” I had no choice, so I agreed to make the change. Trish already felt older than Dante, and the Dante in “DMC 3” is much younger, so it was decided that Lady should be slightly younger than Dante. Her appearance was up in the air for much of development, so I ended up writing her without a clear visual in mind. All we knew from the start was that she’d have black hair. Trish was blonde and Lucia was a redhead, so this almost Scandinavian-looking European should definitely have black hair; that’s what the team decided on. Because what the Japanese audience definitely didn’t want was more blondes or swarthy girls. The whole team agreed that “DMC 3” was a game made for the Japanese. We were happy to worry about the rest of the world later, because first and foremost, we - the creators - would have been in a bad place if the game wasn’t a hit in Japan. Sure, we could have moved millions of units overseas and only tens of thousands in Japan, but focusing on the numbers like that and aiming for foreign sales would have been abandoning the Japanese fans who had supported us this whole time. That was the thought process, so we buckled down and concentrated on making a game that would do well in Japan. Vergil’s katana and sword-draw techniques were also nods to the Japanese fans; we figured that most foreigners probably wouldn’t understand that sleek, simple aesthetic. Lady’s black hair, too. It wasn’t easy, but we appealed to the audience we were aiming for.

Is it typical not have visuals to work with while writing a scenario?

Bingo: It’s often the case that characters are only drawn after they’ve been written into the scenario. Sometimes one might put in an order for the designers to create a generic “heroine”, but with “DMC 3” and “DMC 4”, the scenario came first because writing the script is the fasest part of the process. The descriptions in the script lead to visual designs, and then we use one to improve the other. If we take Lady as an example, she was designed as a black-haired human who naturally has to use guns if she wants to fight against demons. We decided that she shouldn’t be flinging herself at the enemy, sword in hand, which resulted in the weapon-laden Lady who appears in the final version.

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