"Castle of Shikigami 2 was an arcade game released by Alfa System in 2003 as the second title in the Castle of Shikigami series. The vertical scrolling shooter gained popularity for its well-crafted gameplay
mechanics and characters, and is still popular to this day."
The release of Castle of Shikigami 2 on the Nintendo Switch and PC (Steam) has been officially announced, although the release date and price are yet to be revealed. In this interview, we’ll be having a roundtable discussion with some of those involved with the port about its original development and any behind-the-scenes stories from this time around. Here’s what four members of the team that worked on Castle of Shikigami have to share.
Naoki Suda
Works for Alfa System and was the director of the original version of Castle of Shikigami 2. He is also involved in the porting of the game for its upcoming release.
Shigeyuki Teruyama
Advisor to Cosmo Machia. He is the planner and producer of the upcoming Castle of Shikigami 2 port.
Akihiko Eiki
Works for Cosmo Machia. He is the director of the upcoming Castle of Shikigami 2 port.
James Wragg
Works freelance. He was the publishing director for Castle of Shikigami, but is not directly involved in the porting of Castle of Shikigami 2.
Castle of Shikigami 2, a response to fan requests
――First off, can you tell us about how Castle of Shikigami 2 came to be ported over to the Nintendo Switch and PC?
James: I guess it would be good to first bring up the PC (Steam) port of the original Castle of Shikigami game. I’m doing freelance now, but I used to work for a company known for helping Steam get set up in Japan called Degica. At Degica, we handled the sales of a certain company’s shoot ’em up games. Around that time was when I happened to connect with Mr. Teruyama, and that led to talks about releasing Castle of Shikigami on Steam.
Teruyama: Yes, a certain company well-known for their shoot ‘em up games introduced me to James, which got the ball rolling on the idea. I then went to negotiate with Mr. Suda on the premise that we’d develop it at Cosmo Machia, and since we’d known each other personally for a long time, he immediately agreed.
Suda: Right, that’s how it went with Castle of Shikigami. So we figured that since the first game was ported that we should also do the same for Castle of Shikigami 2, because people had been voicing a desire for a port of it too. This came about in particular with the release of a shooting game in 2020 called “Sisters Royale: Five Sisters Under Fire.” That title was labeled as a spiritual successor to Castle of Shikigami in terms of gameplay mechanics, and we received comments from people basically saying that it was great but that they wanted to play Castle of Shikigami 2 as well.
James: And this time, Castle of Shikigami 2 is getting released not only on PC, but also on the Nintendo Switch. As it turns out, there are many fans who want to play the game on a home video game console.
――Is it difficult developing both PC and Switch versions at the same time?
Eiki: In a sense it’s not too difficult since the game isn’t a remake or a remaster; we just ported over the source code and implemented it. Of course that’s not to say that there weren’t some challenges. Incorporating additional elements and improvements into the Nintendo Switch version was also fairly easy though.
Still, just bringing things in as-is doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to faithfully reproduce the game. What platform the game is being run on and all sorts of other issues can make differences emerge. We’re still ironing out things like that.
James: That’s right. It happened with the PC port of Castle of Shikigami too. During the debugging stage, we didn’t realize that the score multiplier for a part of the game was different when we released it. A player in Japan that I know who has the arcade board pointed out that the score multiplier was wrong, so we had to fix it. Just goes to show you that seasoned players might know more about some of the finer details than we do.
Suda: Right. There are lots of people that have explored every last bit of the game over the years even more than we have, and we’re grateful that they love the game so much.
Teruyama: Also, the first Castle of Shikigami game had arcade, PlayStation 2, and Xbox versions, each with their own differences in the code. So if you were referencing the Xbox version...there’d be things that differed from the arcade version.
Suda: It’s amazing, right? This is just speculation, but shooting games tend to follow set patterns. Seasoned players might notice that the same pattern they've always used suddenly results in a lower score than they would expect.
James: Speaking of ports, the overseas version of Castle of Shikigami was pretty wild (laughs).
Suda: Oh, yeah, “Mobile Light Force 2.” No comment (laughs).
James: Actually, when releasing the Steam version, I’d been thinking a bit about also including that as an option. But in the end decided against it since I thought it would upset the fans (laughs).
――All right everyone, can you give us your thoughts on what you think makes the Castle of Shikigami series so appealing?
Suda: About that... As the creator of the original game, this is hard for me to answer (laughs).
Teruyama: As a shooting game that relies on the characters, it’s the characters themselves that are very appealing. For example, when I was in Korea for work I found out that one of the characters, Daejeong Kim, is pretty well-known. There’s also the fact that the scenarios and setting created by Mr. Shibamura* are excellent.
*Yuri Shibamura once worked for Alfa System. He created the setting for a group of Alfa System titles called the Unnamed Setting. Games like Castle of Shikigami and Gunparade March take place in the same universe.
James: When it comes to the gameplay, I really like the tension bonus system where you get a higher score multiplier and the power of your bullets change the closer you are to enemies or enemy bullets. Veteran players who pay attention to their scores will enjoy the thrill, and beginners can aim to upgrade their bullets when they can, meaning the gameplay varies depending on who plays it.
I guess I can say this now, but since it’s a shooting game, there’s honestly not a lot of dialogue. I thought it would have been easy to localize, so I took it on myself. In reality, it took me quite a lot of time to translate the Unnamed Setting details and the meanings behind them, as well as all the specialized terms (laughs). It was through that that I came to know more about the depth of the story, characters, and worldview. In Castle of Shikigami 2, the dialogue changes when two people play together, which I think is awesome.
Suda: In Castle of Shikigami, all we had to do was prepare dialogue for the number of characters. But with Castle of Shikigami 2, I realized that the lines would need to increase with two people playing at the same time... We just had to go for it (laughs)!
James: I’ve got nothing but respect for you there.
Suda: By the way, the whole tension bonus system was based on UPL’s “Omega Fighter,” and from there the mechanics were developed. While the first Castle of Shikigami was out, Success’s “Psyvariar 2” was pretty popular. Our tension bonus system was often compared to that title’s “buzz” feature, where you could receive power-up effects by getting grazed by enemy bullets, but we were actually influenced by Omega Fighter.
I’ve always liked fighting games that let you take risks, and I really liked the fact that you could get more coins by creating gameplay patterns. I try to make the coins burst forth as much as possible, so that it feels like I’m earning that much more. Of course, beginners can just play at a slower pace without focusing on earning coins.
Teruyama: When I heard all of that before with James, it really impressed me just how much Mr. Suda loves shoot ‘em ups.
James: I mean, there were six characters in Castle of Shikigami, and that got increased to eight in Castle of Shikigami 2, with each character having very different abilities. It must have taken a lot of work.
Suda: Yeah, it was a royal pain to be honest (laughs). Even when it comes to normal attacks, they all have different methods of attacking. This was done to make the characters unique. I wanted the players to not only love the characters’ lines and scenes, but to also love how they feel when playing and everything else about them too. Turns out that created a lot of trouble for the team... It wasn’t so bad with Castle of Shikigami, but it was a lot of work with each of the eight characters having two types of Shikigami for Castle of Shikigami 2 (laughs).
But it’s because of this that I believe I was able to create characters that anyone could use at least one of. For example, beginners can use Kohtarou’s auto-attack (“Zasae” Shikigami attack) to defeat enemies, while more experienced players can use Fumiko to make bank with her laser (“Satellite Laser” Shikigami attack), which is powerful but requires a lot of precision. That’s how I made it so the characters would resonate with different people.
Teruyama: If you don’t know the characters’ abilities, you might choose to go with Sayo at first since she’s cute (laughs).
Suda: That’s because she’s a shrine maiden (laughs). Oh, and the reason why I made Sayo a shrine maiden is simply because I wanted to. Castle of Shikigami was made on a Taito board, so I felt like I just had to make a shrine maiden named Sayo... I’ll let you guess why (laughs).
――The Castle of Shikigami series has also been highly praised for its music. What are your thoughts?
James: Yeah, I think it has a really good array of songs.
Teruyama: When we released Castle of Shikigami on Steam, there were also talks of releasing a digital soundtrack.
Suda: I told the members who were working on creating the music at the time what sort of atmosphere I was looking for, to an extent at least. Something that the games in the series share is that the first stage is where the most attention is captured, so we had to be careful with the tempo and melody. For Castle of Shikigami, I wanted the focus to be on the vibes, but for Castle of Shikigami 2, I had them focus more on the melody.
A new mode that boasts serious difficulty
――A new mode was added to this port version. Is there anything in particular that you’d like to mention about it?
Eiki: Ah yes, the new feature called “new entry mode,” which is a game mode completely arranged by Mr. Suda himself. The enemy placement in all of the stages differs from the original version. I was able to play it, and it’s simply a blast. It’s fairly difficult, though.
Suda: Yes, I made it to be challenging. Basically, it was designed that way for the stages to feel new for those who have already played the original Castle of Shikigami 2. Things start out not too hard, but it will prove challenging for new players since the difficulty level rises around the third stage. Those who are new to the game might want to just focus on completing the arcade mode first.
There are lots of people streaming games these days, so I can’t wait to see how players are going to suffer (laughs). Streaming didn’t really exist around the time of the original version of the game, but there were strategy guide DVDs and the like. I’d check them out and play using all sorts of unique strategies, which was fun and often unexpected. I’m pretty sure that the players will surpass my expectations for this new mode.
――I believe the specs will basically remain the same, but are there any differences between the Nintendo Switch and Steam versions?
Eiki: Of course we can’t guarantee that everything will be exactly alike since the game is still under development, but the basic elements are staying the same.
Teruyama: There’s the appeal of the Nintendo Switch version’s portability, where you can play it at anytime and anywhere on a vertical screen. But then again, these days many PC gamers have dual monitors with one of them being vertical, or they use monitor arms to temporarily turn their screen vertical, so it can also be pretty easy to play on a vertical screen if you have a PC. Back in the day, we made vertical screens by turning our CRT TVs on their sides (laughs).
Suda: Yeah, that’s so true. When the original version was developed, you had to play on CRT sets, which were heavy and hard to turn over. And that’s why we developed the game using the smallest possible TV, although that made it hard to make out the graphics (laughs). I even once asked a friend who ran an arcade to let me sneak in a development board so that I could test it in an arcade cabinet.
――Was there anything particularly challenging about porting the game?
Eiki: Well, I’m actually not that good at shooting games. And with my skills not being the best, I’ve been struggling with things like checking and debugging (laughs)... I almost cried when I first tried new entry mode.
Suda: Sorry about that (laughs). Um... I’ve never told anyone this, but one time I accidentally wiped away the data for a certain stage (laughs). There’s this thing that’s like a stage editing tool, and for some reason, I forgot to save the data when it was almost complete. Just like that, almost all of the data was gone (laughs). Luckily, the data was output as actual game data to be implemented and not as the tool's data, but I was left with the daunting task of then having to read that data and place everything anew.
Eiki: Whoa! That’s news to my ears (laughs).
Suda: The recovery work alone took several days...
――Well, I applaud your hard work... Lastly, do you have any parting words for our readers?
Eiki: I’m honored to be involved in this port. I'll do my best to meet the expectations of all the Castle of Shikigami series fans. The new mode is fun! I also recommend it to those who've never played the game before. Please don’t hesitate to add it to your Steam wishlist.
Teruyama: We finally made it happen. As a fan myself, I’m looking forward to it, and I hope that many players try it out. Personally, I hope this gets the shoot ‘em up community buzzing.
James: As a fan, I’m very happy of course. The same team that worked on the Steam version of Castle of Shikigami is involved in this, so the fans can be sure that they’ll be getting to play something made with care. For those of you who haven’t played it yet, be ready for a very challenging shoot ‘em up experience. If you’re reading this, I hope you end up getting the game!
Suda: To those who said they wanted to play Castle of Shikigami 2 on modern gaming systems, thank you so much for your patience. I was in charge of new entry mode, which is a big highlight of the game. Some of those stages were created to pay homage to the original version, while others are completely different. There are many ways to enjoy playing the game, so try to complete all the stages and get the highest possible scores you can.
This interview was conducted and composed by "Famitsu.com"
You can read the original Japanese interview from the following URL.
https://twitter.com/famitsu/status/1441258653646929927
https://www.famitsu.com/news/202109/24234524.html