In part one of our interview series with Yoshiro Kimura, I asserted that Kimura-san is the game dev equivalent of Bob Ross. Before announcing that opinion, I should have remembered that not everyone thinks the image of a boy kissing a frog as they blast off into outer space is as wholesome as I do. While Kimura-san shares many of Bob Ross's personality traits, his art shows little of the same adherence to calming realism that made the famed TV painter such a hit.
This was especially true in the days of the PS2 and the Wii, two consoles with audiences large enough to support even the most bizarre, potentially unmarketable games at retail. Kimura-san really got to cut loose back then, with a particularly keen eye for the twilight years of adolescence, the place where childhood ends and adulthood begins. It's a painfully human place, where feelings define perception of reality, and innocence and evil can walk hand in hand with no contradiction.
These places can be funny, scary, or just plain "inappropriate" by puritan standards, but in Kimura's hands, they never failed to provoke. Rule of Rose's cruel and unusual coven of young women, the kiss-crazy protagonist of Chu Lip, the child-monarch of Little King's Story, and of course, the laser sword-stroking antics of No More Heroes are just a feww examples, all bearing Kimura-san's signature.
For part two of our three-part interview with Kimura-san, we talked about how he defines this era of his career, his disdain for the idea of big publishers, love, death, gratitude, regret, and a lot more. Peeling back the layers, this onion's guts are starting to show...
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via destructoid
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