Nintendo's "Iwata Asks" features have long been a great resource of information for fans of old-school games and people who are interested in learning more about recent Nintendo releases. In the latest installment, Nintendo's CEO and president sits down with two of the people behind Pokémon X and Y for a wide-ranging conversation.
One of the unusual things about the new games is how they've been released simultaneously across a variety of worldwide territories. That worldwide vision comes across in the origin for the names for the games, too.
"The world holds people with all sorts of ways of thinking, and you can get a sense that they exist in different dimensions," explains Junichi Masuda, the games' director. "But if you think of them as people who think on the x-axis and people who think on the y-axis – horizontal and vertical axes – then they intersect somewhere. ...We may think differently, but we all live on the same planet, so everyone eats, sleeps, and goes about their business day after day just like everyone else."
On a somewhat less philosophical note, the team discussed some of the things that popped up during its transition to the 3DS. "In turning it to 3D, I was able to get a clear grasp of aspects that I wasn't very aware of before," says Tsunekazu Ishihara, president and CEO of the Pokémon Company. "For example, what I thought was a tail, would turn out not to be, or I'd start to offer instruction about a whisker only to be told it was a horn! (laughs)"
You can check out the entire exchange at the Iwata Asks site. It's worth a read, though be warned – you may get sucked into reading some of the other entries as well. They're kind of addictive.