Exclusive Interview: Fishing Master World Tour

Mike Pepe, director of marketing at Hudson, recently shared some insight into Fishing Master World Tour, expected to release on Nintendo Wii in early 2009.

NintendoSpin: Fishing Master World Tour has over forty locales. Are there any differences in locales besides the scenery and types of fish? For example, will players have to employ different strategies for each locale, either with bait or other parts of their equipment?

Mike Pepe: Actually, the different bait & strategies go hand-in-hand with the different types of fish in each locale. In some locales, you’ll find native fish, or even some rare fish, that like a specific type of bait. Each fish behaves a different way, too, so you’ll need to battle them differently. Some fish won’t put up much of a fight, some will fight a lot at first then tire out, and some will fight you the entire time. And just imagine what it’ll be like to land one of the new boss fish we included in this version of the game!

One of the best parts of fishing is seeing how big the fish you catch are, and keeping track of that. Is there a stat tracking system in Fishing Master World Tour and if so, what sort of stats are recorded?

Yeah, there is. Every fish you catch is recorded to your Fish Journal. You can look at the journal and see exactly which kind of fish you’ve caught in each region. It will show you the fish itself, the length, and the weight of the largest fish you’ve caught. Actually, there are also descriptions for each fish. I can’t say I ever wanted to learn about fish, but it’s pretty interesting to read through the descriptions. I actually spent 2 straight hours one day reading through them!

Fishing Master World Tour features about 200 types of fish. What are the differences in fish types, aside from their looks?

Well, I think the difference in their looks is half the fun, but I’ll get to that in a minute. As I mentioned before, different types of fish take different types of bait and put up a different fight on the line. Some are only around during certain times of day or certain seasons, just like in real life. The rare fish, which appear as red shadows in the water, are even harder to land and are worth more points that normal fish. The boss fish are definitely a new twist in the game. These fish take a lot of work to land, especially when you get them right up to the shore or the edge of the boat.

So getting back to the looks, I gotta say that the development team came up with some amazing fish. Sure, there are a lot of real life fish that look pretty realistic in the game. My favorites, though, are the mythical fish the dev team made just for this game – the bosses. There are fish made out of metal, a fish with a person’s face, and way more. It’s really exciting, and surprising, when you land one of these guys.

Could you expand on the “trolling mode” in this game?

Trolling is another word for deep sea fishing. Basically your character is seated on the back of a moving boat and casts out the line with one of the heavy fishing rods. As your boat goes further your line lengthens as it spools out. All there is left to do is have a beer and wait for a marlin to take a bite on the line. That’s when the fight comes. The locations vary as well as the fish that you catch but some of the biggest ones in the game can be caught here. Hawaii is the first spot you will encounter that allows deep sea fishing.

The Wii remote and nunchuck allow developers to recreate the motions for just about every type of activity. Could you explain the controls in Fishing Master World Tour and how they mimic the real life actions?

Sure. Just imagine that your Wii Remote is the fishing rod and the nunchuk is the reel. Use the controllers just like you would a real fishing rod. That’s what we did in the original Fishing Master, and it worked so well we kept it for this one.

You turn your nunchuk to reel in and use your Wii Remote as the rod to cast, hook, and stun the fish you battle. For Fishing Master World Tour, we added easier controls to allow new players to get into the game. Reeling in fish can be as easy as pulling on the Nunchuk analog stick, pressing the Z button on the nunchuk, or simply pushing down on the D pad. We want people to catch lots of fish and gave them a ton of control options to do so.

One of the more exciting features of the game are the offline and online multiplayer modes. Could you talk about these modes and what you hoped to achieve when players got together to play Fishing Master World Tour, both online and offline?

As you know, Hudson develops party games and we like to make games that have some wild multiplayer action. We wanted the multiplayer mode to have this feeling in FMWT, and by including 4 players to battle each other, we achieved that feeling. There are different settings that you can set as you go from one fishing spot to another, such as competing for the most points or the largest catch. Even if you can’t catch the most fish, you still have a shot at landing a whopper and winning, so this is a multiplayer mode everyone can play.

Online play consists of Wi-Fi leaderboards ranking the best players in the country against each other. Think you have the biggest fish? How about the hardest battle fought against a boss? Jump on line and pony up your best scores and catches to see how you fare against other players.