Scalebound originally starred a young, female protagonist

Was shelved twice before this version

Scalebound is one of those games I’ve just been excited about since it was shown off at E3 last year. A new game from Platinum, the master of character action, about riding dragons into ancient combat while modern music blares in your Beats headphones. That sounds like a pretty badass combination to me.

However, according to an interview between GameSpot and Hideki Kamiya, the game went through a few very distinct redesigns between its initial pitch in 2006 and the version that surfaced in 2014.

Perhaps most notably, at one point it was going to be a motion-controlled Wii game about a little girl and some dinosaurs.

When they first started, the idea was for a Wii game and we wanted to use a Wii remote to do the orders for the dinosaurs. You were in control of the dinosaurs, you were ordering the dinosaurs around, and they’d do cool things. Then after we made Bayonetta, we started the prototype. The first thing that I made a change to was making it a dragon game.

We changed the dinosaurs to dragons, but at that point the lead character was even weaker than Drew is in the context of Scalebound. She was actually a little girl who was with these dragons. As we were making this prototype, I realized that I didn’t want to just be watching the fight, I wanted to be more participatory in the fight. And I started talking with the staff about how maybe we should change this to be a swordsman or someone a little bit older. This was when the prototype got put on the backburner, so to speak, and the project was halted.

While the change from a Wii game with dinosaurs to Xbox One game about dragons was probably a pretty good call, there is a little bit of me that’s sad the game’s protagonist was changed to being a male hero for combat strength reasons. I kind of like the idea of a super strong eight-year-old warrior girl flying into battle and swinging a halberd around adeptly. 

So, would you have bought a Platinum Games Wii game about a little girl and her dinosaurs?