Under Night In-Birth developers interview

4Gamer.net posted an interview with the developers of Under Night In-Birth, Nobuya Narita (France Pan/French-Bread representative) and Kamone Serisawa (battle planner).

Beast Note again has a summary.

- They wanted to do a new Melty Blood (tentatively Melty Blood HD) but they need to find a way to continue the story first. At the time, TYPE-MOON's Kinoko Nasu (author) was busy with Mahou Tsukai no Yoru, so the project is postponed.
- However, UNI is completely new project. It's not based on Melty Blood HD prototype.
- They fear that UNI won't sell because it's an original work (not based on any popular work). They had a bad experience before when they did self-published stuff (doujin).
- They took a challenge by making it an arcade game instead of a doujin game. One of the reasons is there's no real brand new fighting game at the moment.
- UNI is distributed through Sega's ALL.Net P-ras MULTI. (A network that distributes arcade games to game centers, same with Taito's NESiCAxLive and Konami's e-AMUSEMENT Participation. The shops take no risk of losing money on buying dedicated cabinets each game, but they share income with the network owners.)
- The first idea in the development of UNI is "something different from Melty Blood." This's why it has no aerial combo like MB.
- They said MB has "launch, aerial, then air throw" impression.
- They feel relieved after getting good feedbacks from players, especially about characters and world setting.
- UNI is about ground game so they were worried about Hilda which is (as they said) the only projectile-dependent character in the game. (Boss character Hilda was unlocked as playable on November 2.)
- They said Vatista (also has long-range projectiles) is different from Hilda. Vatista is wait-and-see character.
- They said we won't see Eltnum as playable character in November.
- Eltnum is actually a modified test character from "Melty Blood HD." They had some time after the early stage of development and they wanted to add one more character but they didn't have enough time to make a complete new character. They had permission from TYPE-MOON.
- They said there won't be a Melty Blood character in UNI.
- For UNI, they avoid doing frequent small updates like what they did to MB.
- Narita personally wants to distribute [UNI PC version] on Steam.