7 Blades was an interesting, early-ish PS2 game published by Konami, featuring sword-based combat for the male character and gunplay for the female. It was released in Japan and Europe, but strangely not the USA. Since I’m about to post my copy to HG101 overlord DiscoAlucard for an article, I thought I’d also put up this interview featured in the game’s manual, with Kaizo Hayashi. Developer interviews in game manuals, now that’s what I call classy! I wish all manuals had this..
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Apparently Hayashi’s a famous film director. I’ve never heard of any of his films, but considering how utterly batshit insane and awful the 7 Blades story is, I can’t imagine they’re all that great. And I don’t think it was localisation problems, since 7 Blades features the original Japanese voice track with subtitles – it’s just honestly ridiculous. Not bad ridiculous, rather the kind of totally-super-radical-awesome ridiculousness that only videogames can get away with. You know what I mean, Kojimaesque writing.
CLICK TO ENLARGEHaving said that, Hayashi does make an excellent point about how there are certain things that only games can do, which no other communicative medium is capable of (be it music, theatre, literature, cinema or interpretative dance).
Any way, enjoy the scan. I’m guessing few have read this since it wasn’t released in the US and his Wikipedia page doesn’t even list the game in biography. Which is just how we roll – bringing the obscure to light.
I've seen one of his movies, Zipang, and can attest to its utter lack of anything resembling sense or pacing. It's almost like a video game, so it's unsurprising to hear about that a video game made by him would be the same. Kind of a shame it never made it to North America.
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