Today Scalebound Creative Director Hideki Kamiya was on Crackdown's Extra Life livestream alongside Executive Producer Atsushi Inaba and Creative Producer Jean-Pierre Kellams, and they talked quite a bit about Scalebound, their work at PlatinumGames and more.

Here's a recap of what was mentioned:

• Kamiya-san's favorite Transformer is Optimus Prime
• He loves dragons and dinosaurs. Way back in the day, Platinum had a prototype of a game with dinosaurs. That prototype was started, then canceled, then restated and they ended up with dragons. That's kind of how they came up with Scalebound.
• Scalebound is not like Bayonetta in which you live or die on a single frame. How good you are in Bayonetta depends very much on timing. Scalebound is "a little more cerebral." The idea is how you do cool combos and awesome things with your dragon. It's more about understanding where you are in relation to your dragon, and understanding what he's doing and then playing off of each other. The craziness isn't from twitch button response, even if the button response is actually very good. The craziness comes from combining what you do with your dragon.
• J.P. Kellams was playtesting the game today, and the dragon and him went off and did their own thing separately, then they started overlapping repeatedly during the course of the battle, and that ebb and flow is really cool. "When you understand that, it doesn't have to be twitch to be crazy."
• Kamiya-san never played Monster Hunter, so any similarity is purely coincidental.
• Kamiya-san would like players to feel that they're never fighting alone, so no matter how bad or good things are going, you always have your dragon to back you up and support you.
• Kamiya-san's favorite modern game that isn't a Platinum game is Forza Horizon 2.
• The name Scalebound has a meaning: the game has an enormous scale, and dragons also have scales, so "Scale" was a keyword for the team. "Bound" also can refer to Drew's journey and to relationships, and has multiple meanings. If you think about all the meanings of "Scale" and all the meanings of "Bound," and all of their combinations, it's a very good hint to all the things that happpen in Scalebound in term of gameplay and story.
• When PlatinumGames create games, the designers keep making them harder and harder as things go on, while producers tend to try and make them easier, so a good balance point is normally found by combining the two points of view.
• Kamiya-san decided to make games simply because he loves them. Inaba-san decided that when he was a kid, and the same goes for J.P. Kellams, when he was five or six.
• There was a dinner way back in the Capcom days. Inaba-san invited Kamiya-san to it, and all the higher-ups at Capcom were there as well. Inaba-san basically told them that one day he'd quit Capcom and start his own company to make his own games.
• Kamiya-san is a huge fan of the first Gundam series and of Go Nagai's Majinger and Getter Robot. According to him, if PlatinumGames ever makes a Gundam game, it's gonna be badass.

I'd certainly be down for a Gundam game by Platinum, especially considering that actual Gundam games that get released are pretty much hit and miss. That said, I can't say I'm not excited for Scalebound.

Give me a dragon, and I'll be happy like a little kid. It's been like that since the times of DragonStrike by Westwood on my old MS-Dos PC.