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Bayonetta Main Programmer Confirmed as Metal Gear Rising Director

Kojima and crew detail how Platinum got involved in the project.

 
Metal Gear Solid Rising before it lost the Solid and became Revengeance.

The mystery director for Metal Gear Rising Revengeance has been confirmed in this week's Famitsu to be Platinum Games' Kenji Saito.

In a dialogue (summed up by Sokuho@Hokanko) featuring Kojima Productions' Hideo Kojima, Platinum Games' CEO Tatsuya Minami and producer Atsushi Inaba, Inaba once again confirms that Hideki Kamiya has no involvement in the game, then mentions Saito's role. There had been some speculation that Kamiya was the director, something that Kamiya repeatedly denied via Twitter.

Saito was the main programmer on Bayonetta. Inaba says that he's been working with Kamiya since the Viewtiful Joe era, and his involvement in games and game design has gone beyond the frame of a mere programmer.

As reported earlier, Kojima also confirmed in the dialogue that the game will be playable at this year's E3.

The three also provided some insight into how Platinum Games' came to work on the project. Kojima Productions first approached Platinum with the idea in 2010, but Platinum thought the offer was just a joke. It was at the PlayStation Vita announcement event last January that they began to talk seriously about it.

Kojima says that prior to Platinum's involvement, the game had progressed in terms of story, event scenes and character modeling, but the game design was having some difficulties. The Kojima Productions staff did not feel that stealth and high speed action would work well together.

After seeing some of Platinum's early work on the game, Kojima felt, as a game designer, that "this is it." The game was 60 frames per second and did not have the stealth component.

Eventually, they ended up changing the story around, a request that apparently caused the game's scenario writer to be a bit annoyed. Some of Yoji Shinkawa's work ended up getting tossed because of the change.

Kojima says that the game in its current form is close to what they'd originally wanted to make.

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