How SaGa: Scarlet Grace Creator Was Inspired By Dragon Age For A Little Voicing Option

SaGa: Scarlet Grace’s updated version on PS4, Switch, PC, and smartphones releases in Japan tomorrow, and key devs including series creator Akitoshi Kawazu shared an interesting bit on one of its new features in an interview with 4Gamer.

4Gamer: As an additional element there’s character voicing, but I found it interesting that you can select between two types of intonation.

Akitoshi Kawazu, Designer and Scenario Writer: The direction of having two voice types was a bit of a reference, in a sense, actually the idea came from a game called Dragon Age.

Again, that’s another one from an unexpected place.

Akitoshi Kawazu: In Dragon Age you were able to pick from numerous voices for the character create. Of course there wasn’t much meaning behind it, only for self-satisfaction, but it was fun and I thought it would be cool to do something similar one day to further increase player satisfaction. This time we decided to newly add voices, and not even fully-voiced, but I just wanted to throw it in there.

Yasuhiro Ikuta, Director: But Kawazu-san, you did forget about adding the two voices until just before recording. We heard that idea from the beginning of development and everyone was onboard, but when it was time to record, Kawazu-san reacted like “Huh, we’re really doing it!?” [laughs]

Masashi Ichikawa, Producer: I remember thinking “As expected of Kawazu-san.” [laughs]

Akitoshi Kawazu: [laughs] But I do think it ended up being a good idea to have the two types. Those who played SaGa: Scarlet Grace might feel that it was different than what they expected, so we gave them room for options. The voice actors were tremendously talented, and they all recorded on their own this time, but working on the same scenes twice (in different voices) just came so naturally to them.

When it comes to smartphone games these days there are many who choose to play muted, but when you actually play with voicing it’s completely different, right? It just makes things more lively.

SaGa: Scarlet Grace is available on PlayStation Vita in Japan. It’ll release on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC, iOS, and Android on August 2, 2018 in Japan. For those of you curious about what else is new, check our previous report for a closer look with comparisons.