tenup wrote:The one thing this game has over the rest are the post battle replays. There are alot of benefits to the feature however it was the only game to include it. I remember many epic finishers and with the replay showing different angles of the final moments of the battle it made it more rewarding. I dont understand why they didnt keep this feature in the remainder of the series?
Superrex wrote:I believe the reason the replays were taken out was because the PS2 version of Save the Earth couldn't handle them, so they did away with them all together. If believe it's in an interview on the site.
Edit:
http://www.tohokingdom.com/vg/gste/interview.htm
There you go.
I'm guessing this may be a reason why we never got a PS2 version of DAMM.
I think it was overly simplistic of me to say "The PS2 couldn't handle it." Like all things, it's a matter of costs.
GDAMM (and the other games) is VASTLY more complex than other fighting games, because of the thousands of destructible objects & AI vehicles which influence the fight. Instant replays were a feature my friend Solomon wanted, and he worked hard to get them working. Every time we added more to the game, it would break the replay system, and solomon would have to spend days getting it working again. We had more bugs with the replay system than anything else - simply because it was trying to simultaneously record EVERYTHING happening in the game all the time, to support that 2-second rewind moment.
When we started planning StE, everyone knew that dropping replays was something we were going to do. Continuing to support it would have slowed everything down - meaning fewer features getting finished in the game. We were also looking at porting to the PS2 and memory was a big issue we worried about there - ditching replays did half of their optimization work for them.
Essentially it's just a matter of tough choices - every feature you build into the game comes at the cost of all the other features you could have created with that time. We knew that the replay system just wasn't stable enough to exist without a LOT more work, and we decided that we'd rather put that work into the other game features. We all knew it was cool, but that's just part of the development process - even ditching replays, we couldn't get all the cool things into the game we had hoped for (like Biollante, or the upgrade system.)