TV Tokyo Interviews: The Past and The Future of the Rockman EXE Series

Nearly 19 years have passed since the release of the first Rockman EXE game and, as such, Tokyo TV had the opportunity to interview Masakazu Eguchi (aka Mr. Famous, known as Eguchi Meijin in Japan) and other members of the Rockman EXE development team in a two-part interview.

Nothing groundbreaking was revealed here but, nonetheless, it is a very interesting read. Topics discussed include the origins of the game, how the EXE world was able to predict the technological future of our own society, and other interesting topics. You can read our translation of the interview after the break!

If you want more after reading this article, I recommend you to visit our good friends at The Rockman EXE Zone and read their translation of the Rockman EXE 15th Anniversary Special Staff Discussion.

Thanks to Sidier for translating this for us in a record time!

"It’s been 18 years since then. The future shown in “Rockman EXE” and which Eguchi Meijin talks about has become a reality."

The Twitter hashtag “#it’s unlikely but I still wait for a sequel of game x” became popular and as a result, “Rockman EXE” joined the trend. For many men in their 20s or 30s, it’s a legendary series which they played passionately when they were elementary students. It’d seem there’s still strong-rooted fans.

One of the things that stand out within the games is that, despite being released in the early 2000s, the fans comment that “the times have caught up”. The games are about working together with an AI installed in a portable terminal and face against cybernetic terrorism. They’re full of other settings that were ahead of the times and they do look like they predicted the future.

Today we’ll go behind the stages of “Rockman EXE”, the present, and we’ll interview Eguchi Meijin, who stood in the frontlines as the icon of the games as well as working on the scripts. We’ll try asking how he was able to predict the future so accurately.

Also, this interview is being held through a TV meeting with the Capcom Tokyo Branch Office. This is also one of the futures depicted in “Rockman EXE”.

Also, this interview is being held through a TV meeting with the Capcom Tokyo Branch Office. This is also one of the futures depicted in “Rockman EXE”. 

It originally was a horror game. The abandoned idea of a “Tug of war system”

Please tell us about how the games began.

“To tell you the truth, back in the day we were working on a horror game project, something quite distant from “EXE” (laughs). By adding a sensor to the Game Boy Advance, we would be able to detect how scared the player was. At the time, the haunted mansion of “Biohazard” was being held in the Osaka Expo Site, my boss brought me a ticket and told me “Go check it out!”. I remember that I played in the amusement park despite being work hours” (Eguchi Meijin )

──It really had nothing to do with “EXE”, yes. (Laughs) 

“One day, and without warning, another project was set up. Card games of “gather cards to become stronger” were the latest, most popular trend back then. An idea of making a game mixing action, which we were experts at, and gather items to become stronger, appeared. And so the project switched over to “action X card game”. (Eguchi Meijin) 

──So the origin of the “Battle Chips” was card games, then. 

“Take into account that children at the time liked things apart from action games. EXE sought to break away the structure of “only kids good at action games can beat the games”. “If you gather strong Chips, you can beat the foes even if you’re not good at action games”; the key was to incorporate card games elements. And the “Program Advance” concept of combining the chips drawn to turn the tables was implemented by the same reason.” (Eguchi Meijin ) 

──I see

“However, there was a lot of “trial and error” until the EXE battle system was set in stone (laughs). For example, there used to be a “tug of war system” at the start (of development).” (Eguchi Meijin) 

──A tug of war system!?

“When you run out of HP in the actual game, you lose, right? But the tug of war system worked on filling a gauge by damaging the foe, but if you got damaged instead then the gauge decreased. The rule was to either force one’s way with the gauge or for the predominant one to win when time ran out. But the tempo (of battles) was bad, as well as not being as simple (as it sounds like) so we struggled a lot” (Eguchi Meijin) 

──The battles would’ve been too long, yes. 

“Since the concept was to make a fusion of action + card games, we had to make something new and fresh as a battle system. It’d seem that the pressure worried the people in charge a lot back in the day, but I’ve been told that, ultimately, the boss told them “don’t over-complicate things, just use HP to battle each other” as advice, and they broke through with it” (Eguchi Meijin)

The reason they predicted the future was “fun answers to questions”

── How did you create the unique world of the “Cyberworld”? 

“The “Classic” Rockman games are about robots. A world built upon machines. So if we wanted to make a “modern Rockman”, what concept should we base it upon? That’s when we thought of the “Internet”, which was quickly expanding at the time, as the answer.” (Eguchi Meijin)

──I see. You incorporated the latest tech and rebuilt a new future. 

“Another big influence is that, at the time, cellphone games were the trend. Nowadays even children get smartphones, but back them cellphones were items that only the adults used. Children have a longing towards things adults can use so being able to experience that in a pseudo format, the “let’s play adult”, was one of the axis of this world. Everyone had a “PET” shaped after a cellphone; this setting was born from the reality of the times.” (Eguchi Meijin) 

──Playing adult? The trick to getting children to like the games was there, then? 

“The theme was “growing up to the big brother generation”. It’s neither reality or fantasy, we sought to make a world that could happen in the future. We built up a story that made hard words understandable, we aimed to make all gadgets “smart”, and thus the world, scenario and gameplay as well as designs smashed their hearts” (Eguchi Meijin)  

──Those computer terms everyone knows nowadays might’ve been "maniac knowledge" at the time

“Netto-kun, the protagonist, and others, often use computer terms such as “bug”, “virus”, “network”, “EXE”, and that’s in purpose. Children feel that words as those, used by the adults, were “cool”. “A bug popped out” or “It’s infected by a Virus”, are things children would like to say, don’t they? (laughs)” (Eguchi Meijin) 

──The world of Rockman EXE predicted a lot of things that happened afterwards. Apart of everyone carrying terminals with AI on them, and the electro-domestics being controlled through the network, they really predicted the smartphone. How were you able to predict the future so accurately? 

“It might feel like anti-climatic, but it was fun answers to the “it’d be cool if this actually happened” thematic, and that led to deciding the settings (laughs). Ovens and fridges weren’t linked to the net back then but we were like “what would happen if it actually happened?”. The network society concept was a good one. “That’s what would happen!”. We were able to pull a lot of fun answers (laughs)” (Eguchi Meijin)  

──What! I was convinced it was due to a combination of detailed research and asking experts. 

“Well, what makes tech improve is the fundamental desire for “it’d be good if it did this”, no? Given how reality has caught up with it, it might mean that humans are getting closer to the world they dreamt of” (Eguchi Meijin) 

The “Under Network” that showed the dark portions of the net

──The risks of the network are clearly shown in the games. Such as at the “Under Internet” where bad Navis gather at

“The motif of that was the “darkness of the Internet”. There were a lot of “underground” sites on the net back then. Some copied you games if you sent them a CD by post mail. And there was a real “dark web” too. I think that, for children, the net was fun but it also had scary parts to it” (Eguchi Meijin) 

──Or it might’ve been something children would like to stay away from

“But there’s children that sometimes feel like seeing those fishy sites their brothers knew about but told them to not to look at. The Under Internet was made thinking on that real feeling of growing up. Nowadays there’s the “back accounts” in SNS, so if we were to make an “EXE” game nowadays, the depiction of the net itself might need to be changed. Something like “Meiru-chan’s back account got found out!” (laughs)” (Eguchi Meijin) 

── In “Rockman EXE 2”, a genius boy named Obihiro Shun is lied to by bad adults in the net and stains his hands in cyber crime; that was impactful indeed 

“Communication through the net was a very new form of human relationship at the time. I combined both the positive and negative parts and added my idea of “that’s probably what’d happen” into the story. In Shun-kun’s case, he commanded his subordinates through the net while pretending to be an adult, but if you over-exaggerate it then it might involve the survival of the world, and that’s why I wrote such a script.” (Eguchi Meijin)

──This story is something that could very easily happen nowadays indeed

“I didn’t only want to ring a warning bell about the risks of the net. It was written in the promotional poster of the 1st game as its catchphrase: “We’re linked”; the theme of the series is the links between people. Even if they’re through the net, they’re all humans in the flesh. I wrote my ideas of “greet someone when you meet them” and “I want the children to become like that” straightly into the games.”  (Eguchi Meijin)

──Is that why the Navis aren’t AI assistants like “Siri” but partners with a life of their own?

“Good point. I focused on a relationship of not master and servant, but as of friends and partners coexisting. Rockman’s personality is Netto-kun’s twin elder brother, Saito-kun, as well, so, as family, they’re very close. And since I was writing about the importance of life, I had Navis undertake depictions hard to portray with the humans. When Navis lose to battles against foes, their data is “deleted”. The manga version of Rockman EXE made a good use of those elements indeed.” (Eguchi Meijin) 

──In what kind of scenes?

“For example, when the Navi of Netto-kun’s classmate Dekao, Guts Man, is deleted. He’s revived through backup data but Dakeo is saddened because “this Guts Man, revived through the backup data, is not the same Gutsman of when he was deleted”. And thus these depictions that’d be too heavy for children are told through the Navis, at least that was my intention” (Eguchi Meijin)  

“You are the ones who decide that”

──I feel hints of how to confront technology as I talk with you. In “Rockman EXE 4”, the story was that the last boss, Duo, would destroy the Earth if he decided that humans are evil. In current day terms, it feels close to the “AI annihilation theory”. 

“EXE 4 began from the “Dark Chip” system, and the theme was the “right and wrong”. The Dark Chips are illegal Battle Chips that appear in the game that are very strong but, on the other hand, you had the risk of decreasing your max HP. We let the players decide whether to use them or not, and set it up to ask children about what’s right and what’s wrong. What we wanted to tell here is that “it depends on how you use the network like”. Everyone has a “wrong” side to their hearts, but how do you confront it? Duo is but an arbitrator, and the game ends with him saying “you are the ones who decide that”. Of course, my intent was to pour the idea of “choose correctly” into the game” (Eguchi Meijin) 

──The world becomes more convenient but it’s a theme one must think about, yes. How does the “present” look like to Eguchi Meijin, as the world of “Rockman EXE” and reality link together? 

“I feel like we’re still in the dawn of the Internet. We’ve advanced a lot in terms of technology but I feel like that humans haven’t caught up with technology. For example, writing ill comments in SNS using anonymity, or, inversely, attacking an individual together and claiming that it’s “justice”. I think that once the “linking people together”, the true meaning of the Internet, roots in, the net society will also advance into the next era” (Eguchi Meijin) 

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The secrets of the making of “Rockman EXE”, as the development staff tell us. Is it possible for a new game to happen?

“Rockman EXE”, which swept over the game world in the 2000s. A world of a neat future where we live with AIs, a scenario mixing reality and fantasy, blending card game elements into the action, a revolutionary battle system, it enchanted the youth of the times in the blink of an eye.

Today we’ll interview the development staff of these titles, those who built that era, through a TV conference, as if we were in the games! Meijin Eguchi, in charge of the scriptwriting, and who stood in the forelines as the icon of the games, the designers Yuji Ishihara and Tomonori Hashinaga , the programmers Koetsu Matsuda  and Dotoku Kataoka , the Rockman series producer Kazuhiro Tsuchiya … Episodes that happened behind the scenes of the legendary successful titles, as well as possibilities of a new game… They’ll tell us a lot of things.

From left to right: Tsuchiya, Kataoka, Matsuda, Eguchi, Hashinaga

The white coat of Meijin Eguchi makes us remember those times!

The character designer Yuji Ishihara joined us since he had a chance to

The “sad reality” that created “Mejin Eguchi ”

──Let’s begin by asking Mejin Eguchi. You’re in charge of the series’ script but how did you become “Mejin Eguchi”? 

Eguchi: It’s a very sad tale... 

The others: (Laugh) 

Eguchi: The first game was released in 2001. We were going to showcase it in an event of a magazine for the young. That’s when we were asked to bring someone who’d come to the stage and explain the game to the audience. My boss asked the planners of the game if any could join, but the event was going to be held in the middle of the “Golden Week”.

(Translator’s note: Golden Week is a week ranging from April 29th to early May and containing several Japanese holidays;)

The first one to turn it down was the director, my senior was next… I felt their sights focused on me, and I turned around; then my boss asked “You’re free, aren’t you?”. At the time I was still a freshman who’d only been in the business for 2-3 years so I couldn’t refuse (laughs). 

──I didn’t expect it to be such a raw reason...

Eguchi: You might’ve expected a bright episode “The secret story of the birth of Mejin Eguchi” but reality is harsh (laughs). 

Matsuda: When you took part in the event you weren’t “Mejin” yet but “Eguchi Hakase” (Hakase = Dr.), right?  

Eguchi: Yes, indeed. But since I was addressing children, just calling myself a “walking dictionary” it wouldn’t have impressed them.One’s worth comes from strength so I introduced myself as “Mejin Eguchi ”, claiming to have 69 serial victories in PvP battles. 

──That of the 69 victories is made up, isn’t it?

Eguchi: But I really have over 69 victories! A row of about 30 formed during the event and I went on beating them one after the other. 

Matsuda：You were very popular back then. 

── Oh! So your strength is really “Mejin-class”, isn’t it?

Eguchi: ... Well… Yes! 

But I am but the scenario writer so I had almost no involvement with the making of the battle system. So it’s not like I had advantage over the normal players… Well, I did win back in the days of EXE 1 and 2! (laughs)

──And what about from EXE 3 onwards? 

Eguchi: The players became very strong! They were able to use the technique they’d built up with the 2 games so their skills went on improving. 

Until EXE 2 I carried a GBA with me and I would undertake a battle if I was challenged to one, but from EXE 3 onwards it was “Ah. This is bad, I’m gonna lose” and so… (laughs). But a “meijin” can’t lose, right? And so the others in the staff told me “Please, don’t take a GBA with you” and “we forbid you from undertaking battles”. 

──What did you do if the children pressed you to battle them?

Eguchi: Run away, of course! “I don’t have a GBA right now!”

── (Laughs). By the way, I loved the interaction of “Mejin-san!” and “No need for “-san”!” but is there an origin to it?

Eguchi: That’s what the anime version of Meijin says. Netto-kun, the protagonist, calls him “Meijin-san”, but he corrects him saying “No need for “-san”!” and it became a running joke; I did influence the anime. 

How were the designs of such attractive characters created?

──The designs of the characters of Rockman EXE were very good, to the point one easily remembered what Navi had what Operator. 

Ishihara: Hah, hah, hah. One can think so, yes. But in truth, there are plenty of cases where Navi and Operator would have different designers each. 

──Is that so!?

Ishihara: Around the time of “EXE 3”, the quantity began to increase, and so most of the time from there onwards, the designers for Navi and Operator were split. The orders usually came when the story was set in stone, and so the design was easy to image. Adding the same motifs and image colors to both parties made it easy to tell as well, I think. 

Ah, but… There were also cases where, normally, the combination wouldn’t be the ideal one; such as the Indian-like Mahajarama and the Western wizard Magicman. Why did it end up like that, I wonder (laughs). That’s pretty interesting, or so I think. 

──What are you careful about when undertaking the character designs?

Ishihara: The first thing I thought of was how to represent the Navis, which were neither humans nor mechanical entities. It was a world where anything was possible, things impossible in reality, but if we took it too far then the players wouldn’t be able to keep up, so I always took into account the “balance between originality and friendliness”. 

When dealing with joints, I worked with mysterious materials that looked both rigid and flexible. I did feel “that’s cool” or “what’s this? (laughs)”, fun or surprise, as I worked on them.  

Hashinaga: The players were elementary school children, so I focused on designs which even children could make with their illustrations. 

Ishihara: True. Using as few lines as possible and making it easy for both children and for the TV anime to draw them. Sometimes they ended up with an odd shape or with characters that were hard to shape; I did feel sorry for the complications, but...

As for the humans, we aimed for fashion not too different from the one in the current age, and tried to make them look friendly. In the game they’re only shown as small sprite characters and close-ups of the faces so we put effort into making their traits stand out. 

──Is there any character you’re really fond of?

Ishihara: I had fun designing all of them so I like all of them but one I’m really fond of is Blues. It was one of the first things I did but it was the first one in which I got a hold of the directionality of the series and he’s so cool so I like him a lot. 

The Program-kuns are the fairies of the cyberworld

──The world of Rockman EXE is really very detailed. The biggest detail is the “Program-kuns”. They live in the network of electronic appliances and control their functions; how was that idea born like?

Eguchi: Rockman, one of the protagonist, is a program with a will of its own, right? So we thought of putting other characters in the appliances, something akin to “fairies”. 

──So they’re fairies operating the appliances, then. 

Eguchi: From there onwards we expanded the image… For example, if there some of them in a car, they’d probably split into one in charge of acceleration and another in charge of the brakes, and each must think “I’m needed for the car to run” and “I’m needed for the car to stop”. Once we’ve come to that phase, the scenario easily comes along. 

Something like “The brake responsible has caught a cold and the car’s running berserk so bring him a medicine for the cold”... (laughs)” 

──Oh, I see! Is there an scenario that left an impression on you while making it?

Eguchi: The villain who uses flame Navis, Hinoken. His storyline was hard. He does bad things across the series, but since he began but by burning the oven, then next he’ll do something flashier… Or something along those lines.

If a big fire happens then you gotta leave burn marks in the map after solving the incident but that’s a hassle in terms of development. So in the case of Flameman in EXE 3, the needs of development led to the portion of “in that case let’s not do arson but make it be a huge increase in temperature” (laughs). 

Why did “Escape” vanish, and how was the “Prism Combo” born like?

──From what you tell me, there must’ve been plenty of “hellish and hard episodes” during development… 

Matsuda: As programmers, the battle between the software and the data capacity was a harsh one… 

Kataoka: It was a dire distress, we ended up trying to trim down as a kind of part-time job (laughs)

Hashinaga: Try to use fewer kanji character, reduce the orientations of the NPCs. The overseas version used so much text that they ran out of space and sometimes they had to cut the “Plug-in” movie, too. 

Ishihara: Speaking of which, reducing even 1 frame in the movies freed a lot of space, so as the series advanced the amount of frames decreased. By “EXE 6” we ended up to the extremes of having a program create the animations… (laughs) 

Kataoka: We had to release in a year’s time, including bug checking and fixes so the development schedule was very tight. There were odd routines each year such as “let’s do bug checking during the summer” (laughs)

Matsuda: What was hell was the development of “Rockman EXE 4.5”

Kataoka: That was really horrible!

Matsuda: EXE 4 was finished, and when we thought that we’d begun on 4.5 right away, the making of 5 had begun too. And there was also the overseas versions as well as collaboration games between EXE and other works. We were making 4 titles at once and we were bustling with activity. 

Eguchi: And it’s not like we got new staff, either. It was a very hard time, but we pushed through while behaving like it was a P.E. event. We all got along, we slept in the office, played catchball in the development floors. It was like “an endless previous day to the culture festival” so we did have plenty of fun at it (laughs) 

──Speaking of which, EXE 2 was released about 11 months after EXE 1 and a lot of dissatisfactory things from EXE 1 had been fixed. There was so little time for feedback and yet how did you manage that increase in creativity? 

Matsuda: While making EXE 1 we had a lot of cases of “I’d liked to do this differently”. But since EXE 1 was a GBA launch title, we had to sell it following the laid out schedule. There were several parts that we had to give in due to the scheduling issues. When the development of EXE 2 begin, we fixed those straight away. Such as “The “Escape” Chip was a mistake” or so (laughs)” 

*In EXE 1, there was no choice to run away from the Viruses and you could only escape if you used the Battle Chip “Escape”

Eguchi: It’s not an episode where we struggled at but what surprised us was the “Prism Combo” of EXE 2. It came into light in the tournament of the Next Gent World Hobby Fair… 

▲ Prism Combo: By shooting the “Forest Bomb” into the object setting Battle Chip “Prism”, this combo allowed to instantly defeat enemies in a radius of 1 tile around the object

Matsuda: That did impress us, yes. But once you understood the why, we were like “well, obviously, no wonder” (laughs)

──How did the combo work like? It’s not a “bug move”, is it?

Matsuda: Strictly said, it’s not a bug, no. When the development began, this combo didn’t work. What’s more, to avoid a phenomenon like that, we tuned the game so that if the Object A appeared the Object B would break… But, accidentally, Prism and Forest Bomb’s priority rank became the same for each one 

Tsuchiya: The product quality control of our company is done by a team called the “Tuning Room”, who do test playing and fix mistakes and the game balance. A large team went over these calibrations but after a game it’s released it’s played at once by tens of thousands of persons. Errors not foreseen inevitably happen

Is it possible for a new title to be made?

──They haven’t been ported to other hardware and you can’t play them nowadays; the “illusionary Rockman EXE games” of the arcade version (Rockman EXE Battle Chip Stadium) and the mobile version (Phantom of Network) exist. It’d seem that, among the fans, there’s a “long-awaited porting theory”. 

Tsuchiya: Oh, yes, there were mobile versions of EXE. 

Hashinaga: Huh!? There were EXE games for mobile!?

Tsuchiya: Yes, there were. 

Eguchi: So there’s a big demand for them to be ported, then? I’ll take note of it!

Ishihara: I’ve played them once as part of a test, but I also wish for them to be ported! (laughs). I remember that the director in charge was very happy at my designs for the “Jamming Man”. 

Kataoka: The arcade version is harder, in terms of techonlogy. Even if we can overcome those, reissuing the readers and cartridges to play the game would be hard to…  

Hashinaga: I know it’s not about the topic, but… As a designer, I fussed over the with the color adjustments to match the darkness of the GBA screen, so I’d actually like to play them on the hardware they came out on instead of in a port (laughs). 

──Rockman EXE has predict the future a lot but, if you were to make a new one now, what kind of game would it be like?

Eguchi: Hmmm… EXE was a thing because it was of an era where the network hadn’t matured yet. I think that’s a big reason of its success. We depicted things as “it’d be good if this ended up happening” or “this will happen sooner than you think”, but most of it has already become a reality or reality has overcome our expectations. 

Hashinaga: We couldn’t expect the Wi-Fi to fly (laughs). We did everything with wires back then, after all. 

Eguchi: I think it’s going to be harder to fit the upcoming times in the packaging of games. I think there’s no longer a shared view of the future. Back on the days of the “BBS”, we all gathered in a single place and had fun together but now it’s the days of the “SNS”. 

You could say that “society” was the main subject but we’re shifting into an age where the “individual” is the main subject. The future each of them visualize is different from the others. It’s a very hard problem to be able to summarize or compile that in the world of a game. 

──I see. I think there’s a lot of fans who’d wish for a new game, but does the possibility exist? 

Tsuchiya: Each series has its own fans, and I’ve heard a lot of voices asking for sequels. There’s no rule that says “we’re not going to make any sequels of this game”. However, were are proud of Rockman EXE being top contents back in the day, and shallow ideas aren’t the answer to the avid voices. To make a sequel, we’d need careful ideas and preparations, the trends of the age, and whether the market is ripe for it… We need all of these factors to be perfectly on our side

Eguchi: There are some parts that were due to coincidences, but since we’re being told that “you predicted the future”, these games did satisfy expectations. Overcoming those components is no easy task. We must overcome our imagination as we meet up with the expectations. If conditions for us to be so confident happen, then there might be a chance

It’s been a long time but Rockman EXE still remains in the hearts of those who were youngsters back in the day. The hurdle is indeed high, but when the legendary staff members see through the next age, Rockman EXE might make the fans enthusiastic again. 

Sources: Part 1 and Part 2