A Call from Heaven: Shane Bettenhausen Talks About El Shaddai [Full Interview]

 UTV Ignition is known for high-quality games such as Deadly Premonition and Blacklight: Tango Down. Luckily, I managed to catch up with Ignition's Director of Business and Marketing Shane Bettenhausen at the Los Angeles Anime Expo this July 3. Bettenhausen was kind enough to field a few questions about Ignition's upcoming dreamlike action-platformer, El Shaddai; he attributed El Shaddai's warm reception at the convention to the game's deep roots in anime and explained why El Shaddai is aiming for a unique treatment of Christian mythology rather than simply "selling" the religion.

GamerGaia: What titles have you worked on in the past?

Bettenhausen: Since I've worked at Ignition, I've worked on a lot of different titles, the big ones being King of Fighters XII, Muramasa: The Demon Blade for the Wii, and Deadly Premonition for the Xbox 360. Recently we've put out some more, but El Shaddai is definitely the biggest game that I've been involved with since I've joined - it's a huge production.

It was made in Tokyo with a team of about 65 guys in two and a half years. It just came out of Japan at the end of April, and it's really exciting to be able to bring it here to Anime Expo. It's a game that is very deeply inspired by anime, so I feel like it's a game that's visually weird and strange. At E3 we had a lot of people going, "What's that, it looks weird," but here [at Anime Expo] people think it looks pretty cool. I knew this would be a group that would actually appreciate this kind of game.

GamerGaia: What would you consider a defining feature of El Shaddai?

Bettenhausen: Well, most people come to look at the graphics because it's a visually unique game, and I think part of that is that we brought an artist on to make the game; his name is Takeyasu Sawaki. He had previously worked on a game called Okami, a game with really cool graphics that came out for the PS2 and GameCube from Capcom about five years ago, which everyone loved. We saw what he did with that game so we approached him and said "hey, how would you like to make a new game with a new art style, kind of like Okami but different?"

The premise we wanted to make a game about was the Book of Enoch, which is something some people might have heard of - it's part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is this sort of alternate version of the Old Testament. That's actually my favorite thing about the game, that the story it's based on is a part of the Western mythology of Christianity. Usually games are afraid to tackle that subject if you think about it. Bible Adventures for the NES or any game based on religion is usually a bad game because it's usually just put in to try and sell it. But in this game, we actually wanted to take this text and treat it in a new way, to give it to a team in Japan that doesn't have any connection to that. They're not religious in that way, so they could treat it as just mythology and create a new graphical style and a new gameplay style.

I think the graphics would draw you in, but for me it's actually the story that kept me playing, and the gameplay. It's similar to a game like God of War in terms of the controls, it does actually have a lot of depth, and if you have played games like Bayonetta, you will find enough depth to interest you - but if you're someone who doesn't play those games, the game is still simple enough for you to understand and enjoy it.

GamerGaia: What can you tell us about the main character, Enoch?

Bettenhausen: So he is a Biblical character; he's in [the Book of ] Genesis, so we felt like we couldn't do too much with him so he doesn't talk a whole lot in the game... but that's a part of the reason why the game became such a hit in Japan, was we had these two characters, Enoch and Lucifel, the two main characters, and they really caught on there with this meme. Part of it was that Enoch only says two things in the whole game; one of the things he says is, "No problem, everything is fine," and when he dies he can come back to life over and over again, and every time he comes back he says that.

He's just this kind of basic good guy, he was brought to Heaven to work there because he was so pure of heart and so devout. In some ways he's intended to be the most devout and Christ-like person ever. He's the only human in the Bible that never dies, so because of that I wouldn't necessarily call him the most interesting character. He's definitely a fun and heroic character, but Lucifel is the character that people are gravitating towards because he's the sort of wild and weird interpretation.

GamerGaia: How do you think the American audience is going to receive El Shaddai?

Bettenhausen: Well we always knew it was going to be divisive, because the graphics are so abstract you either walk up to it and say, "Wow that looks cool" or "What am I looking at?" and we found that out at E3 some people think, "Whoa this game looks awesome" while other people are going "This looks too weird for me," but like I said - here at Anime Expo I think with this crowd, they're more willing to take more of a chance on things that are a little different and refreshing. So we always knew going into it that just having this character, having these colors, having these wild dreamlike visuals, some people were not going to like the game. But enough people were going to say, "Hey that looks different, that's new, that's refreshing" and that's what we're finding. People are excited, and in Japan it was a pretty big success. It wasn't a best-seller like Final Fantasy, but for a new IP from a new publisher, it did really well. There's a lot of stuff already happening, there's a manga series from Square Enix, a toy line from Bandai, there's a lot of products coming out in Japan. We're hoping that we can expand on this and do more than just this one game and have a whole line of cool stuff in the future.

GamerGaia: Do you think we could expect an anime in the near future?

Bettenhausen: The manga is all we have for right now, and it just started around two months ago, the first volume of which comes out soon, so there would have to be a lot more manga before there would be enough story for an anime. But definitely, the idea that these characters could eventually have an anime... that would be really close to my heart, because I grew up loving anime and I think it would lend itself well. There's tons of backstory that doesn't happen in the game. The game is about thirteen hours long and in those thirteen hours, there are a few huge plot holes. The director left those in on purpose because everyone wants to know, "Well, what happened during that?" I think the anime or the manga could fill those in.

GamerGaia: Very cool! Let's get back to the game for a minute. There seems to be a ton of platforming in El Shaddai, so what sets it apart from the other platforming experiences available?

Bettenhausen: So initially, the game wasn't going to have a whole lot of the 2D platforming, it was always going to have a lot of the 3D platforming because we felt that a lot of modern games had gone away from jumping. And jumping is the basis for most fun action gameplay; the reason Super Mario Bros. is a good game is because it has good jumping physics. You know, as much as I love the game Enslaved that came out last year, you couldn't actually miss jumps in that game. If there was a jump it just did the jump for you. There are lots of games where you're just given an auto-jump. Even games like Zelda: Ocarina of Time is kind of auto jumping, we wanted to put falling into pits back in the game. So you're going to fall in lots of pits in El Shaddai. However we're pretty forgiving - you don't die when you fall into a pit, you lose a tiny fraction of health, so you have to fall into a pit twenty or thirty times to die.

But you know, jumping is cool, and jumping is important so we wanted to bring it back. Then about a year and a half ago, I was in Tokyo and the director of the game put up the first 2D sidescrolling level in the game and he asked me what I thought, and I loved it, I thought it was awesome, and he was like "that's cool," because he was worried that American gamers wouldn't like it because 2D was considered old-fashioned... but no, we all grew up playing Mario and we all love 2D jumping.

After that he put a lot more 2D in the game, so about 40% of the game is 2D, the second half of the game being more heavily balanced towards 2D, and it gets a lot more complicated. Like the 2D level you'll see here is more running and jumping, but later on there's combat, there's puzzles, there's verticality. So I think in terms of the pure physics and control it's not that unique; you're really just double-jumping and navigating platforms. Later on it gets kind of tough and there are moving platforms and some tough jumps, but really it's meant to be an homage to classic old-school Super Mario Brothers, Mega Man II, the good old days of jumping. Running and jumping.

GamerGaia: I've noticed that you can steal weapons and 'purify' them. Could you explain how that works?

Bettenhausen: Not only can you [steal weapons], but you have to. So Enoch gets sent down from Heaven with no weapons, and the idea is that the seven fallen angels stole a lot of the weapons that the angels in Heaven fight with and gave them to their followers. So Enoch is meant to bring back as many of these weapons as he can to Heaven.

The game centrally breaks it down to three core weapon types, there's the sword which is called the Arch; it's kind of like a chainsaw mixed with a light saber. There's a projectile called the Gale which is actually inspired by Gundam's missile pods. Then there's these two gauntlets called the Veil, and those three weapons form this kind of paper-rock-scissors, Pokémon-style relationship where one is always strong against one and weak against another.

As you progress through the game, you fight a lot of enemies that have these weapons. So when you're fighting three different guys that have these kinds of weapons, there's kind of this order of operations in which you take them out successfully or else it's going to be a lot harder. Plus every time you equip a new weapon, it changes your attacks, your combos, your running speed, your jumping, your dodging, your physics, so there's a lot of depth to those three weapons.

You don't start with all three and you can only carry one at a time, so it's always a real strategic risk-reward of "which one do I want? Do I want to keep this weapon throughout the whole level?" because there are all these secrets, and for a lot of them you have to have a specific weapon to get to them. Although there are points in the game like in the 2D levels and the bosses, where we let you choose any weapon you've previously found.

GamerGaia: Thanks so much for talking with us! Is there anything else you'd like to tell the fans?

Bettenhausen: We're really excited for anybody to give it a chance, and right now the demo that we have at [Anime Expo] is available for download on PSN and XBLA... and for anyone who is coming to Comic-Con, we're going to be having a huge launch party, so keep an eye on our Facebook and our Twitter, which is @ElShaddaiGame. There should be a lot of cool stuff coming out!

Also see GamerGaia's preview of El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron.

For news, reviews, previews and updates on your favorite games, follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Have something to say? Duke it out in the GamerGaia forums, leave a comment below, or connect with other gamers and start your own blog using Gamer Connect, GamerGaia's new social networking feature.