E3 Day One (13)

It wasn't making a fuss over nothing—Rieko Kodama was no nobody in Japan's industry. She had been a core member of Phantasy Star III's development team, and anyone familiar with Sega's product line would know the name.

But placed in the setting of E3, placed in today's context where the producers lining up to take the stage were uniformly male, the visual impact was real.

A United States reporter in the back row nudged the colleague beside him with his elbow. "She's the director?"

"Lead producer. Same thing at Sega, basically."

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Rieko Kodama didn't waste time on opening remarks.

Her English was a fair bit worse than Hideo Kojima's, so she simply said "Phantasy Star IV" and left the rest to the simultaneous interpreter.

The big screen lit up.

A stretch of outer space.

The colors of a nebula shifted from deep violet into dark red, with the arc of a planet in the distance.

The camera pressed downward and dropped into a town in the desert.

The architectural style mixed Arabian and cyberpunk elements. Characters walking along the streets wore cloaks, with some kind of glowing weapon hanging at their waists.

The trailer used a mixed cut of CG and actual gameplay footage.

The level of detail in the CG segments couldn't be compared to that Final Fantasy VII segment—this wasn't a matter of production skill, but of the gap in investment scale.

But the actual gameplay portions were solid.

The characters moved smoothly through the town, scene transitions had no obvious loading stutter, and the battles were turn-based, but their presentation tempo was much faster than in the previous game.

"The graphics haven't improved that much." The editor from EGM watched while writing, his pen moving at an unhurried pace.

The sentence itself was true.

Compared with