What was Koji Igarashi's role in Symphony of the Night?

[Natalie]

I know this sounds like a dumb question, but hear me out. I've been puzzling over something a little bit. So Koji Igarashi is generally credited as the driving force behind Symphony of the Night being such a radical shift away from linear gameplay and into what we now consider the key tenets of the "Metroidvania" - in some cases he even becomes the genre's namesake, with the use of "Igavania" here and there. But Igarashi's credit on Symphony is assistant director, programmer, and scenario writer. The project's main director was fellow programmer Toru Hagihara, who'd previously directed and programmed Rondo of Blood.

Now Hagihara was only the director for the "first half" of the project, per a 1997 interview[1], after which he was promoted and Igarashi was promoted to AD to finish it out. But what I'm not clear on is what the state of the game was at this point and what the extent of Igarashi's creative contributions had been prior. I see unsourced claims that Hagihara was largely a management figure, but given his programming credits I'm skeptical of the notion. All of the material I've seen where Iga talks about production of the game is framed in collective terms: "we" wanted to do this, "we" wanted to explore that. But Iga was at this point new to Castlevania development, having just written the scenario for Tokimeki Memorial before requesting a department transfer to Castlevania during the window when the 32X game (sometimes called Castlevania: The Bloodletting) had entered development.[2][3] This is what throws me - I get that he was a part of the team, but was he as instrumental to the game's direction as his reputation has come to sugest? Who does the structure of the game come from? Hagihara seems to have done very little press in his day. We know the game was developed at the Tokyo office[2] and thus was distant from both the established series staff and the 1995 earthquake that hit their Kobe building[4], so I don't really buy any of the longshot theories about the quake restarting development after Hagihara was gone. I'm just really curious about the idea of Iga as this great innovator and whether it's accurate or exaggerated, and I feel like I'm hitting a wall in answering that question. Maybe that stems from some lack of understanding about what some of these roles entail in a game of that era, director versus assistant director versus producer, etc. I'd love to hear what other folks have to offer on this one.

1. shmuplations.com/symphony/

2. www.eurogamer.net/unfinished-symphony-castlevanias-keeper-speaks

3. EGM Vol. 206, August 2006, pg. 102 - archive.org/details/electronic-gaming-monthly-issue-206-august-2006/page/102/mode/2up

4. www.konami.com/corporate/en/history/

EDIT: There's a thread over on the Bloodstained forum where someone asked a similar question and dug into some sources as well. That can be found here: bloodstained.forums.net/thread/3632/koji-igarashi-confusion-producer-role

[retr0gamer]

I find that in most Japanese games the top of the credit list (usually producer or director) would be that guy that acts in a managerial role,getting the team working well together and helps bring the project through to the end while handling budgets and being the point of contact between upper management and the team. The credit below them (usually planner) would be the creative lead. In this case Igarashi being assistant director looks very much like the creative lead for the project. However games are never usually the creative work of a single 'auteur'. A good creative lead would take normally work with their designers to come up with ideas but it would be the leads job to hammer out the final shape of the game.

I can't say for certain but it looks like hagihara managed the project with Igarashi as creative director. Thats not to say hagihara didn't have creative input, a lot of times the manager of the project would have a lot of videogame making experience and would act as advisor to the project and also contribute.

It's kind of the same with the final fantasy games, Sakaguchi stepped back from creative director quite early but was producer on the games, managing development, offering advise and giving some limited creative input. He would have the top producer credit on the final fantasy games with the creative director or planner credited beneath him.

[dsparil]

In the Aria of Sorrow interview on Shmuplations, it sounds like he started out as only the scenario writer of Symphony but then took over fully as director after Hagihara got promoted. I would assume he got the lower billing out of respect than it being a lower authority position. It's also a little nebulous to what degree Bloodletting and Symphony were considered the same project to people. Igarashi sort of sounds like he considers them as one unit so it's possible that Hagihara was promoted early on in Symphony real development period which let him more or less fully direct it. From a managerial perspective, it seems like that would be the least disruptive move versus plucking the lead out right in the midst of things.

[Natalie]

The EGM quote seems to suggest he views Bloodletting as a separate project. That said, I think it would make sense for them to have done the switch earlier on, but the 1997 interview (which is the only place I can find both Igarashi and Hagihara in the same place) has them both giving that answer of directing for "half" the project.

I understand, of course, that auteur theory is generally not true of any collective media and virtually never so for games. That's sort of the thrust of why I'm curious about this, because Iga seems to singularly get the attribution. Normally I'd think it would make a lot of sense for that structure of a top-level producer being the project manager and the next credit being creative lead, but given that all the sources point to the assistant director position being created mid-development, I find it a little harder to square.

[retr0gamer]

Pretty sure the 32x game transformed into symphony, they weren't really separate projects, more so at phony was born out of it when the 32x Tema moved to PlayStation.

[dsparil]

Part of the problem is that there's a slightly contradictory things said in interviews. In that Aria one, Igarashi says "By luck, when the Symphony of the Night development got underway, I was given the opportunity by my boss to select the game I wanted to work on, and that’s what I chose." but that game was actually Bloodletting.

[shelverton]

I feel like most of us didn’t really start talking about, or even acknowledging Koji Igarashi until 2002-2003 when his actual ”Castlevania era” took off at Konami? There was no such thing as an ”IGAvania” before that (Circle of the moon, from what I recall, was not an Igarashi project, it was just talked about as ”very similar to Symphony of the night”)?

It was only after Harmony of Dissonance (and right before Aria of Sorrow/Lament of Innocence) that IGA was truly hailed as ”the father of Symphony of the night”, both by fans and the press. This is at least how I remember things, but it can also be because I didn’t hang out in video game forums before that so I obviously don’t know what the conversation was like

[Natalie]

He does seem to take some slightly contradictory positions about the relationship between the 32X game and Symphony. Since he's specifically mentioned working on a 32X entry that was canceled, I'm guessing he's just glossing over the details when they don't matter since the immediate aftermath was that he worked on SotN.

Now that you mention it, I do wonder when his reputation began to take shape online. It's true that between 1997 and 2002, his only series credit was a producer role overseeing development of Castlevania Chronicles - Circle of the Moon wasn't him and he reportedly wasn't super happy with how it came out, and then 2002's Harmony/Aria/Lament dropped where he was back in the producer/scenario writer seat. Maybe it was gaming press drawing parallels to Symphony that made audiences aware of him?

[Discoalucard]

I'm just going by memory, but when Harmony of Dissonance came out, Igarashi was promoted to the series producer and that's when Konami PR put him at the forefront as the face of Castlevania. I think they had seen success with Hideo Kojima and wanted to give him a similar role.

I don't think too many people really knew anything about Igarashi before this. Remember that the internet was still in its early days in the late 1990s/early 2000s, so the sources regarding games staff (like Mobygames) was just starting to take form.