Lost Planet 2's Director On The Series' Future And A "Hypothetical" Wii Version

I recently gained complete access to an interview I conducted at Comic-Con in San Diego with Lost Planet 2 director Kenji Oguro. During the interview, I asked the Capcom creator about whether the enormous worldwide popularity of the Wii means he feels a personal pressure to come up with a concept for a Wii version of Lost Planet, in case his bosses said "hey, let's make a Wii version."

"To be honest, we haven't really thought that much about developing a Wii version of the Lost Planet series, so it's a pretty difficult question for me to answer," said Oguro. "I actually don't think it's a series, [at least] in what we've seen in the series so far, is particularly suited for the Wii. I think that Lost Planet is a series that brings out the best of what the consoles like the 360 and the PS3 can do. I think that maybe if the series gets…it's still a series that's almost in its infancy and it's got a lot of way to go yet. It's hopefully going to be a much bigger and better series as it goes along and I think as the series grows, then we could maybe start thinking about doing things on other platforms. But, right now, we're focusing on these platforms."

That's a typical answer for a designer used to that question. It makes for a good headline and doesn't really answer my question. But usually, in the interest of time (you normally have 10-15 minutes to interview, which is condensed further by the need for translation) that would be the end of discussion on the topic. But maybe it was the atmosphere of Comic-Con or because Oguro was feeling brave in front of his boss, Resident Evil 5 producer Jun Takeuchi, because Oguro kept going.

"Okay, just to be completely clear," he laughed, "this is an entirely hypothetical situation that I'm just thinking of right now. We don't have any plans for a Wii version, but if I was going to make a Wii version, I would like to…if you have like the baseball in Wii Sports, it's very simple, it's just swing, hit -- like baseball is, very simple. So if I was going to make a Wii version, I think I would like to make something that takes advantage of the simplicity that the Wii affords. The controls in Lost Planet are pretty complicated, as I'm sure you've seen, with lots of buttons, lots of stuff going on, so I like to make something that distills the essence of Lost Planet into a simple form that is easy to control."

Afterwards, Oguro, Takeuchi, the Capcom translator and I all looked at each other and started laughing. I don't think Takeuchi (or Capcom PR) expected a hypothetical.

"Completely hypothetical," he restated in-between giggles.

Of course, Oguro. Completely hypothetical.