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Right when we made Jet Set Radio,

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00:02:06,208 --> 00:02:09,167
at around the end of the '90s,

3
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the pop culture was great,

4
00:02:13,833 --> 00:02:18,958
as was the youth culture in Tokyo.

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There was a lot of
dynamism and high energy,

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vibrant colors.

7
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It was a period when cute character
kind of things were really popular.

8
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And the music also was a mixture.

9
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It was a period where a kind of fusion
of big beat,

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rock and DJ culture

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was extremely popular.

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And, among them,

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the hip-hop culture of a little earlier,

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entered a bit of a revival and was exactly

15
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the music that I liked at the time,

16
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and it influenced me in many ways.

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So, with the game, I kind of wanted to
broadcast to the world

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what I felt at that time in my youth,

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an image of what was
popular in Tokyo then.

20
00:03:28,333 --> 00:03:32,542
We started to shape it from visual impact

21
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and imaging. So in the beginning,

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for the inline skate game,

23
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we had only a vague idea.

24
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I don't know if the graffiti element was there,

25
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I'm not sure if it was there or not.

26
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The point is, we could have made it
into an adventure game

27
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or an RPG.

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I don't think there was a shooter.

29
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We thought of many scenarios.

30
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But rather than make it a complicated game,

31
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we wanted to make it a simple game.

32
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Through trial and error,
we came up with a fun game

33
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of simply drawing illustrations,

34
00:04:15,875 --> 00:04:19,833
or a fun game where you
simply stroll through a city.

35
00:04:20,333 --> 00:04:24,750
We created a lot through trial and error,

36
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but nothing interesting came out of it.

37
00:04:27,167 --> 00:04:30,708
When we showed our boss something
that wasn't very interesting,

38
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he got really mad at us!

39
00:04:32,542 --> 00:04:34,167
"Are you sure you can do this?"

40
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Up until then, I had no experience

41
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leading a team or creating a game.

42
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I worked as a team member

43
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while I continued to lead the team
and learn through trial and error.

44
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But I had to create a core part that
everyone would find interesting first.

45
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Getting to that point really took a lot of time.

46
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Originally, when 3-D games

47
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came out one after the other,
from a number of companies,

48
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the end objective was that everyone
wanted to create a real...

49
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A highly realistic world.

50
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That was the direction we were all going in.

51
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But, we wanted to offer something different.

52
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In the very beginning, of course,
speaking of Japan,

53
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its manga and anime culture
and things like that

54
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are very strong. So, I thought

55
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that I'd like to create
a game which somehow

56
00:05:57,333 --> 00:06:01,000
cleverly transformed this and refined it.

57
00:06:01,542 --> 00:06:04,208
Then I researched various
computer graphics techniques

58
00:06:04,417 --> 00:06:07,875
and of these, I thought that cel-shading

59
00:06:08,208 --> 00:06:13,208
was perfect and would really catch on.

60
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So, it was really... Well...

61
00:06:17,542 --> 00:06:22,292
Using cel-shading
on the Dreamcast at that time

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was extremely challenging.

63
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Moreover, I can say that
it worked out well, but

64
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we were lucky that we could reproduce it,
so I think it was great.

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Well, in games these days, for example,

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characters with incredible backstories,
where the person came from,

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what kind of family he has,
what he thinks about,

68
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is the norm in character creation, I think.

69
00:07:01,333 --> 00:07:05,292
At that time, when I was
making the character,

70
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what I thought was that I wanted to make it
more like an icon.

71
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In other words, not like a human

72
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but a character like a symbol.
I thought about this a lot.

73
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A representation.

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I like all the characters,
I like each of the various stages.

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I had to balance each character.

76
00:07:36,875 --> 00:07:40,292
This character's here,
so I have to have this character there.

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I made stage concepts with relationships
between characters.

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00:07:49,000 --> 00:07:53,167
Rather than say that I like this as a whole,

79
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I think that creating it with a balance
worked well.

80
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Things like inline skates

81
00:08:03,333 --> 00:08:06,125
and graffiti...

82
00:08:06,250 --> 00:08:09,708
First of all, America was

83
00:08:10,417 --> 00:08:13,958
a great inspiration.
That cultural backdrop portion

84
00:08:14,000 --> 00:08:17,417
was a reference portion that we drew from,

85
00:08:17,500 --> 00:08:21,125
so we wanted to create
a segment of an American city.

86
00:08:22,083 --> 00:08:28,000
The makeup of the game demanded
dense streets, or it wouldn't work.

87
00:08:28,125 --> 00:08:31,042
For example, if it were Los Angeles,

88
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or San Francisco, or somewhere,

89
00:08:32,917 --> 00:08:38,292
it had to have tall, densely packed buildings
to give it a three-dimensional structure.

90
00:08:38,958 --> 00:08:43,833
What's a good example? Bridges up above,
roads going in a line like this.

91
00:08:44,000 --> 00:08:48,833
A city with that kind of
three-dimensional structure was

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essential to the game.

93
00:08:50,583 --> 00:08:52,292
When you think about that,

94
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New York naturally comes to mind.
Yes. We've arrived.

95
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Yes! There is. There is a really hip,

96
00:11:06,042 --> 00:11:08,958
and cool image.

97
00:11:09,500 --> 00:11:12,375
And that kind of hipness,

98
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coolness and fun

99
00:11:16,542 --> 00:11:20,500
I worked hard to put into the songs, as well.

100
00:11:31,833 --> 00:11:36,167
Well, I played with the voices a lot.

101
00:11:37,500 --> 00:11:41,750
I chopped up the voices
and placed them in a different order.

102
00:11:42,833 --> 00:11:45,667
They became completely
meaningless words,

103
00:11:45,750 --> 00:11:49,250
and I chuckled to myself late at night
as I worked on them.

104
00:11:49,792 --> 00:11:51,667
I laughed and composed, that's right.

