But honestly, this "doesn't look right" problem came up quite a bit. For example, even someone like Kiryu - or rather, Ryoma Sakamoto in this game - his face looked completely different when transferred into Unreal Engine.
Sakamoto: For characters like that, we had to adjust their bone structure from the ground up.
Q: You could reuse the existing CG data, right?
A:
Sakamoto: Of course we could, but when the same data is displayed in Unreal Engine, it ends up looking different.
Q:Why does that happen?
A:
Yokoyama: This is just my personal take, but I think it might be because Unreal Engine is better at creating Western characters. So when it comes to depicting Japanese people, they end up looking kind of off.
Sakamoto: With Unreal Engine, things like facial wrinkles and details come out really well, but when it comes to expressing flatter faces like those of Japanese people, it's not as good at handling them. So we had to customize things carefully.
Yokoyama: Specifically, because it's not good with flatter faces, when shadows fall on such characters, it can make their facial features look distorted.
Sakamoto: Just the shadows not rendering well can make them look completely different.
Yokoyama: On the other hand, our own Dragon Engine, which we've spent years developing, is specifically tuned to make flatter facial features of Japanese people look cool and polished.
Q: I see. So the choice of game engine really makes that big of a difference.
A:
Sakamoto: Definitely. Honestly, it was something that caught us off guard early on in development.
Yokoyama: That said, creating the game with Unreal Engine gave us a huge advantage development-wise.
Q: So you're saying you've now gained the ability to develop with Unreal Engine?
A:
Yokoyama: We're not sure yet if we'll continue using Unreal Engine going forward, but we gained a lot of feedback that can be applied to the Dragon Engine.
Sakamoto: We really built up a lot of experience. We were able to bring some of the ideas and functionalities that Unreal handles naturally over into the Dragon Engine.
Yokoyama: Thanks to this challenge, the games we're currently developing - Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name and Like a Dragon 8 - have also benefitted greatly. I think it's really helped to elevate the visual capabilities of the Dragon Engine overall.