God Hand was Okami engine, but with a vastly different perspective/gameplay design, so I think it was just technical trade-offs. God Hand also had a much smaller staff.
On the way to the Vanquish reveal in Tokyo, Mikami-san and I were joking on the bullet train about how we probably should have had better environments. We also joked about how funny it would be to call IGN out on the 3/10. We did.
The vibe was total freedom. If you had any silly idea, you'd walk up to Mikami-san and if it made everyone laugh, it was in. For instance "You're not Alexander" was watching the Mike Tyson speech on Youtube during recording and dying laughing at the whole thing.
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Elvis was originally going to be a black guy, but I lobbied that it would be funny to make him Hispanic. I'm half Venezuelan, so I thought it would be great to have him curse in Spanish all over the place. Quite a few people disliked the idea, but Mikami-san was firmly on board, so we went with it. During recording, we discovered that our voice actor didn't speak Spanish, but I think it almost helped. Great performance.
Another fun VO story was trying to teach Beng Spies (who played Gene) Japanese lines on the fly for groveling. We all had a good time with that.
Um... E3 2006 had a US version with the Frying Pan drop (called Dead Pan, btw) which ended up being cut from the US version because there was alot of feedback from people who didn't "get it." I still think the idea of the cancel, and the name Dead Pan, are classic.
My favorite subtle God Hand thing... When Conchita "holds-up" Gene to get the God Hand, she says "Hand over the arm." Just think about that for a while.
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The whole "WATER..." bit at the beginning of the game is 100% Fist of the North Star.
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Pretty much the more absurd the idea, the more likely it was to get in.
Gorilla Mask was Mikami-san if I remember correctly. I remember the conversation we had about him though... So it's a gorilla. Yes. But there is a zipper on the back. Yes. So it's a guy. It might be. So then it's a gorilla. Perhaps.
Here is another fun God Hand story. My first day on the team (I came on half-way through), I go to meet Mikami-san for the first time. Obviously, I'm a bit intimidated, but I don't want to show it. So we meet, and he starts calling me JCB (a credit card company in Japan) instead of JP. Kinda funny. Then he says, why don't you play the game? So they had everything all set up and they sit me down to play. I died on the first fight. Mikami-san starts brow beating me about it, saying that Americans are supposed to like hard games, but I'm such a bad gamer that I can't even get past the first fight. He is laying down the gauntlet. So I restart. And die. On the first fight. Restart again. Die again.
At this point, he can't contain his laughter. I turn around and he explains to me that he had put me on the early version of what would eventually be hard mode. Except at that point it hadn't been tuned, so if you got hit twice, you were dead.
That was my God Hand hazing moment.
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Credits song story - I showed up to the office one day and everyone was dying laughing. Then I saw the credits. I started dying laughing. Then Mikami-san hands me the sheet where he had written the rough lyrics. (Yep, he wrote them) He asks me to translate them and figure out a way to get the song into English. I start calling everyone I know looking for a singer, and we found Kevin from Panda no Panda. I gave him my lyrics, and he cleaned them up to something he could actually sign, adding things like "Don't act like you don't like the ball buster" and we hit the studio. Recording was Takada-san, Jun Fukuda (who sang the Japanese lyrics), myself, Kevin, and an engineer. It was very very funny. I still owe Kevin dinner for that gig, but unfortunately, we lost touch.