Monolith Soft wants to improve character expression in its future games

Monolith Soft has created a whole series of games that all feature dynamic characters and engaging stories. These adventures are carried by cut-scenes and lore dumps, and with each new release, Monolith Soft has improved to make these aspects more attractive.

According to comments from Monolith Soft's director, the studio is still not satisfied with its production, and it is looking to improve one element in particular that should draw players even deeper into their creations.

Tetsuya Takahashi, co-founder of Monolith Soft and executive director of Xenoblade, has expressed the studio's desire to improve character expression in its titles in the future. Rather than making characters talk and using dynamic camera movements to keep players interested, Monolith Soft wants the characters themselves to become even more attractive through their facial expressions.

“When we say we value expressions, we have always considered them important and we would like to treat them with even more importance in the future. In other words, we covered video game grammar earlier, but there are scenes of small talk, right? If it's a three-minute conversation, we'd get bored of it if it were written in video game grammar. We could press the button, hoping to make progress. On the other hand, when watching a live-action film, even if a scene lasts about five minutes, as long as the performances and the chemistry of the actors work, even if there is no music or special effects, we'll end up watching it anyway. The difference may be in the choice of words or the power of the lines, but the most important thing is the expressions. Many actors can speak using only their eyes, which helps fill a void and keep people from getting bored in live-action media, but for games we can't yet achieve this level of expressiveness. That's why we want to focus more on this in the future.

As an extreme example, if we were to make a ten-minute scene, we would want to do something that could be based on verbal exchanges alone, without music or effects, and that's the goal we think we're aiming for. This is just an example, of course. We're not trying to do a 10-minute scene, so don't get me wrong (laughs).

Coming back to the topic, if we look at the cutscenes of a game, we see that there are a lot of action scenes and flashy scenes, and there are many titles that , in my opinion, would make excellent reference material for future generations. But when it comes to people and the exchange of words and emotions, the tendency is towards actions, while emphasizing the silent parts is still mostly stuck in the realm of video game grammar, so I wish Monolith Soft would get there first.”