https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/projectbook/230526g/ 🇯🇵
As part of their sporadic feature series going over the old internal documents for old classic and cult games, Denfaminicogamer sat with Yuri Shibamura to go over the history and making of Alfa System's Gunparade March, an extremely dense, relationship-centric PlayStation SRPG defined by an ambitious and multi-layered character AI system that just barely holds together, that Shibamaru has attempted to iterate and advance with wildly varying levels of success.
(His upcoming game LOOP8 is the latest take on many of these systems, hence why he's doing this interview; it'll also be the first game in this oeuvre to be released internationally, and I don't think the global publisher has done a great job pitching it, but that's neither here nor there.)
This is a lengthy article that I have absolutely no time to translate and dare not summarize (not least of all because it's hard to know precisely when and when not to elaborate on a game that virtually nobody's even passingly familiar with) but Shibamura's a funny and incisive dude and gives a ton of fascinating insight in the extreme amounts of foresight behind all of his games... of the many interesting discussions published by Denfami, this one has to take the cake.
Read it if you can, or wait a few years for [youtube essayist du jour] to finally make a Gunparade video and hope one of the zillion people who suddenly decide they've always loved the game to get around to translating it, I suppose.

