Yasunori Ichinose, director of Capcom’s monster-hunting game, comments that the development of ‘Rise’ began at a time when the studio did not yet have Switch development kits.
Monster Hunter Rise, Capcom’s successful monster hunting video game, began development on Nintendo 3DS as revealed by Yasunori Ichinose, director of the title, in a recent interview for the Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream aimed at know the ins and outs about the game. Broadly speaking, the creative has commented that Rise began its development on 3DS with a small team experimenting with modifications to Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate.
“Before Rise I was in charge of Monster Hunter Generations , but its updated version, Generations Ultimate , was left to another director. At that time, Mr. Kenzo Tsujimoto (founder of Capcom) said that he wanted to make a portable Monster Hunter for Nintendo Switch and development started to move in that direction. I was often called in to help with Generations Ultimate , so instead of a full-blown development start, Rise started with small-scale moves among a small group of people ,” Ichinose explained. The director of Rise also highlights that development began six years ago.
“We didn’t have development hardware at the time, but that was the deal we had with Nintendo. Development on Generations Ultimate was in full swing, so there were only three people on the team at first: me, the lead planner, and a programmer. We didn’t have a dev kit, and instead used a 3DS . We tested the mechanics that had been in the works since the start of the project by making mods in Ultimate .”
Ichinose explains how the pandemic affected development
“The fiscal year after the development of the game was very influenced by COVID. The company was unable to work for about two months, and we urgently needed to experiment with what we could do from home. We had meetings, recordings and video chats, and in that sense, the work we were doing changed considerably ,” he commented on how the team had to adapt to continue development. “At that time they were also recording the voice actors and, frustratingly, the week after Mr. Kumoyuki made the call to delay things was when the state of alarm was declared. The schedule changed drastically, and after shuffling everything again, we were able to release it in March for Switch as planned .