While God Hand remains a cult classic, fondly remembered by everybody except IGN, the game’s creator, Shinji Mikami, believes he screwed up. The father of Resident Evil has declared that the game should not have been so obscure, and it was all because he’d been given too much creative freedom.
“I’ve released a lot of titles before and I feel that, perhaps specifically with regard to God Hand I was given too much freedom to make that game just as I liked,” explains the Platinum Games boss. “It didn’t sell too well.”
Fresh off a successful Bayonetta release, it seems that Mikami is trying to appeal to a wider audience, and he believes this will continue with Platinum’ next title, Vanguish: “We’re definitely going for something a little more massmarket that will appeal to a wide audience. Certainly a bigger one than God Hand had. We knew that these were points we had to address from the very beginning, and Vanquish is a result of that.”
Regardless of whether or not you agree that God Hand should have been more mainstream, I respect a developer who can look at his creation and realize that it was not perfect, and that he shouldn’t have tailored it to his own needs only. So many developers these days live in a bubble where they spin only gold, and that’s a damaging attitude for any creative person to have.
Mikami: God Hand not mainstream enough [CVG via Edge magazine]
