Monster Strike: Why Street Fighter II's producer will 'never' return to consoles

For decades, Yoshiki Okamoto was one of Capcom's most renowned developers -- he'd created arcade hits like 1942 in the '80s, and in the '90s, was the producer of its all-conquering Street Fighter II. He worked on Resident Evil and even developed portable Zelda games for Nintendo. But in the mid 2000s, Okamoto finally cut ties with Capcom and opened up his own studio, Game Republic. Some of its games were good -- such as Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, for PS3 and Xbox 360. Others were downright bad -- like Clash of the Titans, which is based on the film of the same name and is remarkably unpleasant to look at or play. In the end, Okamoto couldn't make a success of Game Republic, and it shut down in 2011. Suddenly, though, his name is making headlines for the right reasons: He's popped up with a major new title, Monster Strike. Right now, it's the highest grossing game on the Japanese iOS charts, right ahead of Puzzle & Dragons. Like Puzzle & Dragons, it has you managing teams of monsters; but quite unlike it, it's a co-op action game that's best compared to air hockey: You slide the monsters at enemies to progress. Its arcade roots are clear. In this interview, Okamoto, who's in charge of Monster Strike's game design, answers questions about his career -- including why he's "never" going back to making console games -- and developing the mobile phone game that's made local co-op play a phenomenon. He's joined by his collaborator, the game's producer and director Koki Kimura, from Japanese social startup Mixi, which is Monster Strike's publisher, and Michael Oakland, who also works at Mixi in Tokyo, in localization, and who interpreted this interview. The relationship is so close that Okamoto works out of Mixi's offices. I was wondering if classic arcade game development skills contribute to developing mobile games. They have some similarities: Short sessions, repeatedly getting people to invest small bits of money, rather than one big purchase.

Yoshiki Okamoto: The play-time is short, right? The skills that I learned making arcade games... Really making it fun in short bursts is really the big thing. The amount of time that is generally spent playing Monster Strike is the same as you'd spend on an arcade game. There's a major similarity. So you have to keep it entertaining in short bursts. What about the hook of getting people to pay? YO: Well, if we're talking about monetization, it's Kimura that we should ask, isn't it? Not me. Koki Kimura: That hook of getting people to pay is basically the same; it revolves largely around continues. The thing about Monster Strike is that it was built from the ground up, by us, to be a communication tool -- to get people playing games together in the same room again. One of the things that we've done to really encourage this type of gameplay is that when you're playing alone, you'll have to spend your own continue to continue. When you're playing with four players, it takes one continue for everyone to keep going. So it makes it cheaper, and that way, you have a discussion: "Should we continue? Should we not?" And only one person has to make that sacrifice.

How does your expertise over years in the game industry play into making a game like this -- and why is it such a big hit? YO: One thing I was able to use my arcade experience to really make Monster Strike a success is that Monster Strike is a relatively small game; it's not a big triple-A game. I went from working on console games that are really huge in scale -- but in Japanese we'd call this a "handheld" game, in that it's about the size of your palm. It's a much smaller, more focused experience. Monster Strike. The main playfield is self-contained and action-based -- it really does feel like a classic arcade game in that respect. Using my experience in creating arcade games -- while we were creating the game, while we were talking about what kind of concepts we would add in, I could just close my eyes and imagine myself playing the completed game as we were creating it, at that time. I could imagine and project what was missing, what needed to be improved, what needed to be taken out, et cetera. So that made it into a manageable size, because I was able to do that. Are you enjoying working on this more than you were working on big console games recently? YO: It's fun. I'm enjoying it, completely. Why is it more enjoyable to you?

YO: What I really enjoy about making mobile games is that you're much closer to the user. Especially