“Unemployed man” Hideki Kamiya continues to update his YouTube channel in the wake of his departure from Platinum, keeping the world at large updated on what he’s been cooking, his opinions on onsen, and the last time he visited an aquarium.
All of which is a treat, but Kamiya has been chatting about a few videogame-related things too, including the likelihood of him ever teaming up with other legendary devs like Yoko Taro and Hideo Kojima. In short? Kamiya reckons a team-up like that would just cause friction.
After a fan remarked that it’d be great if he ever made a game with Dead Or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki, Kamiya chuckled that he “[gets] this kind of comment a lot,” noting that people often get excited about the prospect of him working alongside Yoko Taro or Hideo Kojima specifically. “Look,” said Kamiya directly into the camera, as if delivering the news that Christmas has been cancelled to a dewy-eyed 6 year old, “It would be a DISASTER!”
“It doesn’t work like in Dragon Ball, where Goku fuses with other characters,” continued Kamiya, “Two people with completely different personalities and ideas would clash. There’s no way you’d get a decent game of that.” Kamiya seems a bit exasperated—though in a good-humoured way—that the prospect keeps getting brought up. “Why is that hard for people to understand?” he asks Japan at large, “There is a Japanese saying, maybe a proverb? ‘Too many captains will steer the ship up a mountain’… so there should only be ONE CAPTAIN!”
So no Kojima/Kamiya collab for us in the near future, I guess, as this would run counter to Kamiya’s strict naval principles. “That’s just how it is with unique game creators,” he says. He probably has a point, although I think it might have more to do with Kamiya himself rather than “unique game creators” in general. He is, after all, a man with very clear ideas about what he wants his games to look like and who can often be a bit, uh, abrasive.
Who knows? Perhaps he’ll mellow out a little as his time off work wears on. Maybe all we need is a few more soothing aquarium visits before we get the Metal Gear Rising sequel featuring Bayonetta that we need to make the world whole.
