The GDC YouTube channel just put up a fascinating talk from 2013. The presentation is by Tokyo Jungle director Yohei Kataoka, and is titled “Tokyo Jungle and Japan’s Gaming Potential.” In the video, he talks about how his inexperienced team managed to create a hit, and he goes into the future of Japanese game development. The hour long talk is definitely worth the watch.
Check out the Tokyo Jungle GDC 2013 talk by Yohei Kataoka below:
For even more on the PS3 game, check out our Tokyo Jungle review. Here’s a snippet of what Heath Hindman had to say about the game:
It soon becomes obvious that the game is played extremely similarly no matter what animal the player takes, and this epiphany can kill one’s ambition. Outside of the stenciled herbivore and carnivore methods of play, very little changes from animal to animal. The only motivations for going through Survival Mode again and again are unlocking story segments and unlocking new animals; the two problems with this are that doing so becomes tedious, and the rewards boil down to more of that same tedium. “Good thing I unlocked the goat because it…huh…wow, it plays exactly like the gazelle, and the deer, and the pig, and most of the other plant eaters….” Bigger animals do handle a little bit differently because of their size and power, but the gameplay remains almost identical: eat, eat, eat, mark territory, eat, mark territory, gotta find a place to eat, more eating, mate to get a new character with stat changes too small to notice…and then eat, eat, eat, and so on.
Tokyo Jungle is in some small ways a success, and in others, a failure. It does deserve a ton of credit for being a fresh type of game, so unique in its concept. This game is also something to consider if you have a lot of gamer gatherings at your place and want something you and your friends can laugh at, as it produces hilarious stories and highlight-reel moments by the dozen. But fun quickly fades when trying to actually go through the game, with the experience being dragged down by the crazy inconsistencies of its own world, sloppy multiplayer, disgraceful graphics, annoying music, an overdose of repetition, and too many smaller glitches to count.
Tokyo Jungle released for PlayStation 3 in 2012.
