Hi everyone. Vanquish director Shinji Mikami here.

Right now, my new company Tango is having a party to celebrate our first official day of business as a full-fledged studio, and I’m the only one stuck working at the moment.

Anyways, Vanquish… Lots to say about Vanquish…

After I finished up God Hand, I didn’t have a team to work with, so I spent about a year and a half staring out a window. Soon thereafter, I was finally back at work in the studio. Vanquish is my first title after this period of almost running away from being a creator. The design of the game started with my initial desire to make a game like the Japanese animated series Casshern, as well as my desire to challenge myself by making a shooter with an incredible sense of speed and no “slogging through” sections.

At that point in the design the game was a shooter with elements of Casshern (punching/kicking) from time to time, but in the end, we settled into a design that was mainly shooter with rare elements of Casshern. When you actually play the game, you realize that there aren’t that many opportunities to punch or kick in the game, but when you do get the chance, the game really does feel like an action game. Even though it is stylistically a shooter, I would be really happy to have action gamers give the game a chance as well. Thanks to the skill and hard work of the team, the graphics are really incredible in Vanquish. I can whole-heartedly recommend it.

For my next entry, I will go into a bit more detail regarding the inner-workings of Vanquish.

Until then, thanks for reading!

(For more Vanquish screenshots, check out our Flickr!)