Konami: The Rumble Roses Interview

Don't miss this! We sit down with KCET's Akari Uchida to talk about pretty girls, mature content, nude wrestling, and excuses to use with parents and girlfriends. New videos and artwork included.

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Today is Valentines Day, and since none of us have girlfriends, it must surely be time to indulge in some of Konami's new, ultra-sexy wrestling game, Rumble Roses - especially as it makes its final retail stop this Friday, finally hitting UK shelves after successful US and JP launches.

Rumble Roses offers some of the most glamorous female wrestlers ever to grace the ring, wth all the techniques you'd expect from the genre - all ehnanced by some incredible aesthetic 'girl-on-girl' detail.

Akira Uchida - Rumble Roses Producer, Konami Tokyo

We recently sat down with charismatic Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo Producer, Akari Uchida, to discuss the game, and all the intriguing issues surrounding it. And the rest. You know what we mean. Get reading - there's some amusing stuff here....

Kikizo: Mr Uchida, thanks for your time today, can you tell us how the idea for Rumble Roses first come about within Konami?

Akari Uchida: The first idea that we had a long time ago was that we wanted to see how good a female character model we could create. My team and I were presenting numerous concept documents to upper management, but most of them were rejected! But since wrestling games like SmackDown! are very popular, and games like Tekken are also very common, we came up with using the female character models with fighting action, so that you can see the girls slowly, but exciting at the same time!

Kikizo: What is the most appealing thing about pretty girls fighting each other?

Uchida: I think we can give some very good educational value to these younger players! [Laughs] And maybe we can reduce any criminal sexual activity will be reduced as a result of playing this game, hopefully.

Kikizo: The game seems to have some really obscure background storylines that precede the fighting itself, what are these and why did you make them so bizarre?

Uchida: You know, we have Japanimation, which is very common, and it's like a cultural background we have. And at the same time, in Hollywood, we have sort of like 'chick flicks', and stuff like Thelma and Louise. And in the seventies and eighties in Japan, we started to see 'female sports stories'. I suppose that by combining these three elements, we came up with some crazy stories!

Kikizo: The Roses girls are obviously attractive, but apparently they have personalities too. We heard you can influence the personalities through gameplay - how does that work?

"Mr Itagaki and I just walked past each other in silence"

Uchida: Because this isn't a licensed title or anything, we needed to create some originality into the characters. So we put some emphasis on the background story on the characters so that they have their own personalities with them. We decided to make the background stories quite serious, otherwise what you see on-screen is just purely sexy and not serious, so we think it balances this out as well.

Kikizo: You have obviously put lots of effort into the character models - could you tell us a little about that process?

Get your hands on hi-res artwork using these links -
and don't forget two more (our fave ones) on the next pages...

Uchida: The first step in creating a new character was to approach this company called VSL, which is very famous for female character models. As the discussions progressed with them, it became very clear that, unlike any other combat game, this needs to show the fighters in many more positions, for example the arms and legs need to be able to move wider, as the different wrestling motions take effect. And also we wanted to express the maximum level for showing the woman figures on the PlayStation 2 - that was a key goal for us. And of course, the breasts and the butt are an important element when expressing the female figure. If it was just static during motion, it would be like a hard ball, but by showing it real-time like this, it comes across as more soft and natural. You know, almost 70% of the development time and money was put into this aspect of the game! [Laughter] That was just a joke by the way...

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