Screamer's multi-lingual anime inspiration comes from a love of fighting games: 'We really like them, even the weird ones'
I am an absolute fighting game sicko, and something I love is when I see the genre's influence reaching far-flung corners of the industry. Kind of in the way two guys with meticulously groomed moustaches will give a knowing nod when they walk past each other in the street.
Upon watching arcade racer Screamer's latest narrative-focused trailer at The Game Awards, the first thing I thought to myself was, "Huh, this absolutely feels like a fighting game." A tournament bringing unlikely individuals together in the pursuit of a larger, evil entity? Conversations spanning multiple languages, yet everyone seems to understand each other? Teams of three, not unlike a certain King of Fighters?
Turns out my vibes were not misplaced, if chatting with game director Federico Cardini is anything to go by. Milestone's "love of Japanese animation and fighting games" did a lot of heavy lifting in influencing Screamer's story and overall tone. "I am personally a Street Fighter player," Cardini tells me. "Our creative director, Michele [Caletti], is a super fan of King of Fighters. And then our QA people are the Tekken guys. We also like BlazBlue, Guilty Gear—we really like them. Even the weird ones."
As I said earlier, Caletti's love of King of Fighters shines through its roster—divided into themed teams of three, something which is practically the SNK fighting game's entire shtick at this point. Having characters divided into small factions was also an easy way to build rapport, rather than isolated individuals coming together under similar circumstances.
As for the other fighting games? Well, turns out I wasn't wrong about Tekken, either. "One final thing that we wanted to do is have all the characters speak in different languages, like in Tekken," Cardini tells me. Though perhaps not for the same reasons as Bandai's fighter. "In fighting games, you see the characters on screen all the time, so it's easier to express their design and their essence through gameplay itself.
"But here we are in a racing game, they're inside the car. You don't really see them, so one way in which you interact with them is by hearing them talking or shouting throughout the race … and they all speak in different languages to even more reinforce who they actually are."
Unlike Tekken, though, Cardini reassures me there'll be an actual lore reason behind everyone being able to understand each other: "We do explain it, we do justify it." Hey, that's a lot more than Bandai Namco has done, so I'm interested to see how Milestone goes about it. Considering things look rather high-tech in the land of Screamer, I'm going to assume there's some nifty auto-translation contraption involved here. Or, you know, everyone just happens to be fluent in every language on the planet. That too.