Paranormasight Revisited: Creating a new adventure
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is an exceptional game. A perfectly-paced, supernatural mystery that keeps you on the hook for the entire story, thanks to its mind-blowing reveals, richly drawn characters and unsettling vibes.
Over the course of the game, and through multiple characters, you’ll encounter the titular ‘Seven’ Mysteries of Honjo, and their associated curses, and discover the truth of the occult goings-on that threaten your lives – and those around you.
By the end, the game cleverly wraps up its mysteries, but even so, you may be left with questions. Like how did the team make it so gripping?
In this new series, we’ll be chatting to the development team, including Kazuma Oushu (Producer), Takanari Ishiyama (Director), Gen Kobayashi (Character Designer) and project members of the PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo team to pull back the curtain on this eerie adventure.
We start with the general premise and setting of the game – and how the team looked to the real world for inspiration.
How did the idea for Paranormasight come about?
We thought about how we could make an engaging, high-quality experience with a limited development window and budget. We decided that the only answer was to come up with an adventure game that leveraged experience from Director Takanari Ishiyama’s previous titles, such as Detective Ryosuke Kibukawa Case Files and Schoolgirl Strikers.
That was when our Producer had the idea to take a horror game – something which works well for livestreaming – and mix in some mystery elements. All that led to the creation of the game that you see today.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Schoolgirl Strikers released in 2014 for iOS and Android devices Japan. It combined card collecting with visual novel elements and centered around a group of young women who have the power to fight against aliens known as ‘Oburi’.
The series received a sequel in 2018, and also inspired an animated series, manga and more.
Detective and mystery fiction is a huge genre in Japan. Were you inspired by any particular games, novels, films or other works?
Takanari Ishiyama (Director): I was very inspired by The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which is an adventure game by Yuji Horii. It all started from there. And our game is set in the same era that Portopia came out on the NES!
What do you think makes Tokyo, specifically Sumida city (previously known as Honjo), such a great location for this kind of story?
Lots of different people from all across Japan find themselves in the city of Tokyo. But Sumida is a downtown area – part of the old, traditional Tokyo. Compared to other parts of the city, the streets have quite a uniform look and feel to them, and there are a lot of residents who have been in the area a long time.
The people who live in these parts of Tokyo have a reputation for being real “salt of the earth” types – hard-working and honest, if a little rough around the edges. There are lots of old-fashioned bars and places to get food in Sumida, and the place has a historic connection with the traditional Japanese sport of sumo, though it doesn’t come up in the game.
So, it’s a place that is very deeply connected with the traditional cultures of Tokyo and Japan, and given that we’re drawing on Japan-specific occult themes, we thought that it would be a good fit.
How did you research all of the different potential curses of Honjo?
We actually visited Honjo lots of times to gather material.
We looked through a lot of old documents in the library, and collected information from archivists at the local chamber of commerce and museum
How did you decide which curses to implement?
Despite being known as the “seven mysteries of Honjo”, there a actually more than seven incidents according to the documentation that we saw.
We thought that this contradiction would actually contribute to what makes this such an interesting idea, so we actually included all nine incidents that we found. As we adapted these for the game, we incorporated the curses into the gameplay as adventure-game mechanics.
Why did you choose to focus on ‘real world’ superstitions rather than invent your own?
This was Producer Kazuma Oushu’s idea.
The original thinking behind was that by using a real-life setting, we could partner with the local government and run promotions where we encourage people to visit, sort of like a pilgrimage. We’ve been very fortunate that lots of players have been kind enough to go and visit the game’s setting in real life.
So, we’ve been able to tell a story in which players can experience the actual location and its surroundings in a realistic way, and this has had a positive impact on the content of the game too.
Why did you decide to set the game in the 1980s instead of present day?
There are a few reasons for this.
Our main themes for this game are horror and the occult, and the occult was very popular in Japan in those days. We felt like we could portray these themes more realistically as something that is closer to home than we would have been able to do with a modern-day setting.
On top of that, eighties culture is pretty popular in Japan at the moment, so we thought that it might help to get more people interested.
We also thought that setting the story in a time where smartphones and other modern tech didn’t exist yet would lend itself quite well to a mystery story.
Ishiyama-san: The showa era was a time when all sorts of new technologies and forms of entertainment started to appear, so I think that it had a kind of forward momentum about it.
Why did you decide to set the game in the 1980s instead of present day?
There are a few reasons for this.
Our main themes for this game are horror and the occult, and the occult was very popular in Japan in those days. We felt like we could portray these themes more realistically as something that is closer to home than we would have been able to do with a modern-day setting.
On top of that, eighties culture is pretty popular in Japan at the moment, so we thought that it might help to get more people interested.
We also thought that setting the story in a time where smartphones and other modern tech didn’t exist yet would lend itself quite well to a mystery story.
Ishiyama-san: The showa era was a time when all sorts of new technologies and forms of entertainment started to appear, so I think that it had a kind of forward momentum about it.
How did you overcome the obstacle of trying to adapt the curses to a videogame, as well as keeping it within a cultural 80s aesthetic?
For the characters, we looked at a lot of different materials from that era online.
I was at primary school in the eighties, so I’m familiar with a lot of the things that were popular in Japan at the time, like TV series, cartoons and TV shows about music. This meant that I had a pretty good idea about what we needed to research for the game. That was a big help.
The game is different to many visual novel-style games in that it has 360-degree areas you can look around. How did you achieve that effect?
The idea to do this came from Character Designer, Gen Kobayashi.
We actually went to Sumida in Tokyo and took some panoramic photos using a camera that could shoot in 360 degrees. Once we had done that, we created the backgrounds on the basis of those photos, tweaking them in places to look closer to the 1980s aesthetic that we wanted.
This means we were able to put together a gameplay experience that utilizes space and depth in a way that doesn’t normally come across in 2D adventure games.
Where did you get the inspiration for the collectible Mocking Birds?
The Mocking Birds are an homage to a set of characters who were popular in Japan in the 1980s called Nameneko.
In English, they were known as the “Perlorian cats”, and they were basically these cats who were photographed doing ordinary human activities
How were the game’s characters decided on?
Once it was decided that the game would take place in Japan in the 1980s, we started to research Japanese culture from that era. From there, most of the ideas that we built on to make the characters came from Director Takanari Ishiyama and Character Designer Gen Kobayashi.
There are some characters that were very intentionally modelled after real people. We designed a character model based on some of the celebrities and entertainers of the late Showa period, for example.
Were any of the main character names chosen specifically because of the meaning behind the Japanese characters used to write their name? How did you think of their names?
Originally, the main characters all had names that alluded to the seven mysteries, but it was a little on the nose and could have easily spoilt the story for people, so we switched them out. Though if you look closely enough, you can still see some evidence of this.
For instance, the character for “Tou” in Ayame Touno’s name means “light”, and is an allusion to The Beckoning Light.
Many thanks to the team for their insights. Join us for part 2, where we’ll go into how some of the amazing ideas for the game were actually implemented.
If you’re yet to experience Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo for yourself then you should give the game a go – particularly if you love mystery stories. It’s available now for Nintendo Switch, PC via Steam, iOS and Android devices.
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