November 09th 2007 Posted in
Official by Yukari-sama
ZUN’s lecture at Hitotsubashi University has been concluded, and the reports are in! Thanks go to those who provided notes, and a huge thank you to Solamarle for translating and compiling the Japanese summaries for us.
For the Readers’ Digest version: ZUN spoke on the construction of MoF, including the folklore that forms much of the game’s foundation and the reasoning behind creating another new game after PoFV. He’s also revealed that he wants to try to reproduce the MoF schedule next year, with a demo release at Reitaisai (5/25/2008, to be held at Tokyo Big Sight) and a final release at Summer Comiket.
ZUN went on to talk about the entirety of Touhou as a body of work, including games, CDs, and manga. He doesn’t consider Touhou as a series, since to him that carries a connotation of shoving out another new game with the same title just to gain sales. He also addressed some rumors of a Touhou anime, indicating that it’s not terribly likely just from the amount of creative work that’d be involved, as well as possible copyright complications.
The final part of the lecture again reviewed ZUN’s opinion on the changing state of the gaming industry, particularly in regards to commercialization; going from the early NES days where creativity was widespread, to growing commercial concerns with the SNES, a return to more innovation with the Playstation and the slow slide into commercialization that we’re seeing now. His final thoughts were to encourage everyone to make games who’s got an idea, and for fledgling developers to stick to their projects and see them come to fruition.
You can click on this post to read the entirety of Solamarle’s summary.
(Read the article)