Hello. My name is Kunihiko Tsuda and I was in charge of creating the cutscenes for Vanquish.

With a game a speedy, well-paced game like Vanquish, we had to take care to make sure that cutscenes didn’t bring down the tempo of the experience. Normally, cutscenes take a game’s script and expand upon them with direction and ideas; with Vanquish, the focus was on two main types of scenes – the areas where we wanted to show incredibly explosive shots, like the action scenes and opening, and scenes where we needed to push the game forward with exposition. Ultimately, there was a good variety in the scenes when you look at the total volume of what we created.

With the latter, we avoided putting in unnecessary action and tried to make things simple. In some respects, it would seem like we were taking it easy, but that wasn’t the case at all. We wanted to make sure that the cutscenes weren’t too long by having the cuts change at the right time and avoiding pointless gaps. We paid attention so that we still had nice pacing and that the cutscenes seemed dense with information to take in.

For many reasons, such as we not wanting to include any pointless cutscenes, and keeping the in-game experience compelling by including lots of scenes playable in gameplay, a good number of scenes were cut from the game. Now that I’ve got the chance, I’m going to show you one of these cut movies, and then you can compare that to what actually made it into the game. I think you will get a good idea of what I am trying to describe.

We were originally going to use this cutscene after you fight the Argus for the first time. Since there were quite a few cutscenes in this part of the game, and this particular scene feels rather subdued, we determined it would slow down the game and did little to make the game feel alive, so we cut it.

This scene was originally going to play once you exit the tunnel in Act 1. However, once out of the tunnel, this movie was simply too long and moving it to gameplay was the best way to make the game feel alive… So we cut it.

I think we were able to make the game fun and enjoyable this way, so if you haven’t picked up the game yet, please do and have a great time.