Tangled Tails: Solatorobo’s Connection To Tail Concerto

Set in the same universe, but not a direct sequel Solatorobo: Red the Hunter is a spiritual successor to the PsOne game Tail Concerto (pictured on the right). CyberConnect2 developed this game also and spent years pitching a sequel that never came to be.

Solatorobo: Red the Hunter has some characters that appear in both titles. Director Takayuki Isobe discusses them, but (heads up!) there may be some spoilers in this interview. If you missed the first part, Isobe talked about the game’s 10+ year development cycle.

Tail Concerto and Solatorobo both have dog-people and cat-people. What makes anthropomorphic characters fascinating?

Takayuki Isobe, Director: Dogs and cats in the real world are animals that have been with humans and loved by us for a long time. As a result of spending such a long time with them, I think we have positive emotions towards their appearance in our genetic makeup now, telling us they’re “cute” and “cool”! (^_^)

That charming look combined with a human’s emotional capability makes the dog-people and cat-people very unique and attractive, I think.

Tail Concerto and Solatorobo both have mecha to ride too. Can you tell us about the process for designing mecha like the DAHAK and what it was like working with Yoshitaka Taniguchi?

First I created the basic designs for the Robos. Then I showed them to the executive director, Yo Matsuyama, and made adjustments to incorporate his opinions. After the designs were finalized, we had Mr. Yoshitaka Taniguchi further adjust the details by incorporating his own thoughts.

Mr. Taniguchi does robot figurine designs as well, so he has a lot of experience with how each part should look to make it more realistic and detailed, which made the overall designs really look very nice.

How does Tail Concerto connect to Solatorobo? The game has some returning characters and the beginning has a similar feeling to the PS1 game.

Tail Concerto and Solatorobo share the same world and are set around the same timeline. In fact, in Solatorobo you will see numerous characters from Tail Concerto including Waffle. We’ve put in a lot of scenes that will make the players who have played Tail Concerto smile.

Now that Solatorobo is finished do you think you’ll ever create Tail Concerto 2 or will the next game be a spiritual sequel to Solatorobo? It seems like you have lots of unused ideas from the Solatorobo art book…

The sequel to Tail Concerto and Solatorobo is up to the success of Solatorobo. Of course we would like to continue creating sequels and related stories. All of those will carry the spirit of Solatorobo yet provide new surprises for the players.

While creating Solatorobo there were a lot of settings and concepts that we came up with which could not be implemented in this game. We hope that we’ll have the opportunity to realize these ideas in the future.