Slap Fight Origins Revealed In Nigoro Interview

Takumi Naramura and Shoji Nakamura may not be household names, but in the indie scene they've made quite a name for themselves with a series of very Japanese (and very funny) flash titles. From the skirt lifting adventures seen in Mekuri Bancho to the ultimate slap fight that is Rose & Camellia, their games may vary in gameplay depth but always remain memorable for the right reasons. The pair, with the help of a few others, have officially formed their own development house named Asterizm and have started to bring their trademark sense of humor and fondness for retro game systems to the masses with the upcoming WiiWare release of La-Mulana.

Gamasutra's Brandon Sheffield got the chance to sit down with Naramura and Nakamura during this year's Tokyo Game Show and asked the pair about their indie roots, but the most probing and interesting topic that Sheffield was able to touch upon in my little opinion was the visual inspirations for their games...

...With Rose & Camellia, we came up with the idea for the game first, and we argued over what story-based reason there would be for the ladies being polite enough to take turns slapping each other instead of going all-out and having a wrestling match. The shojo-manga (girl's comics) backstory you see in the game was the very first thing that popped into my mind.

With Mekuri Bancho -- in old Japanese anime, you saw scenes all the time where students would flip up their teacher's skirt and stuff. That would show up in all kinds of shonen manga (boy's comics), but never these days because of political correctness, so it's sort of a nostalgic thing for people our age.

That's how we came to build a game off it. As you can tell, I get a lot of inspiration from all the games, movies, manga and so forth that I looked through when I was a kid. You can trace pretty much all of my illustration work off one thing or another.

Even since I first played Rose & Camellia, I always wondered how someone came up with such an amazingly simple, but hilarious set up. Initially, I thought someone watched a little much Mommy Dearest, but the euro-styled shojo manga inspiration makes total sense.

Head on over to read the full article to find out how the pair initially came together and they took on "32-bit" graphics with La-Mulana.

[Interview: Nigoro Talk Retro Inspirations, La Mulana For WiiWare] Gamasutra