Mina The Hollower Spoiler Interview: Sequel Talk, Chrono Trigger Homages, And That Ending

And Thorne as the captain of the guard, freedom fighter, eco-terrorist. We’re obviously supposed to understand that he’s doing the right thing out of principle.

D’Angelo: Yeah. But we did want to get that feeling that there’s things that are very clearly wrong, but everyone’s happy about Lionel, right? No one’s upset at him. And getting in this confusion that is you as a player might think this is wrong. But when you look at it, no one’s upset about what’s going on. They are generally happy with everything that’s happened and they look up to and aspire to be Lionel, right?

And they’re all happy with this technology, which Mina invented. Her hands aren’t clean in this. The generators are doing a lot of harm and they’re bad, but they’re also good and people enjoy modern life and they can’t give it up that easily and it has real costs.

D’Angelo: And that’s the kind of stuff that in the Victorian era they’re wrestling with, right? Every Dickens story is about how industry is crushing [people]. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Oh, poor Oliver, he has to steal to get by, or Scrooge is not giving any of his money away. The people are writing those stories because it’s hard to not take advantage of progress. The benefits of progress are very clear. Everyone can use AI and go like, “Oh, I can see why this is going to be helpful or I can see it could be even better one day and be even more helpful.” But also it’s hard to wrestle with the fact that, “Oh, maybe it’s going to result in 5 billion data centers getting built and ruining some rural area.” That’s the struggle of it all.

And I think it also sort of ended on such an interesting note of the way the public perceives heroes and villains. They do not hail you as a hero. They are pissed. They chase you out of town.

D’Angelo: Yeah. I mean, we wanted one component that’s like, of course they would be mad because they liked it, and we wanted one component that’s the way that, if someone has control over the populace, they can just twist every action you take.

Yes, when Lionel confronts you with your crimes, that sets Mina up to be perceived as the villain when she fights Lionel at the end.

D’Angelo: Right. It’s all perspective and it’s fun and it’s controlling that narrative and it’s fun to wrestle with something that may seem good but to someone else’s eyes, it might seem bad.

It did this thing that the game does throughout, which is to be dark and thoughtful, but also pretty funny because some of the crimes that they’re raising are like, “You broke a bunch of our candles. What the hell?”

D’Angelo: Yes, yes. Every time everyone plays a Zelda, they go and break some pots and they think, “Oh, it’s so funny that I can go into everyone’s house and break all their pots,” or an RPG, “I’m going and rustling through their drawers.” So you want to get some of that acknowledging what people are always feeling when they’re playing these games.

On that note, the ending with townspeople naming everything you’ve done wrong reminded me of the courthouse scene in Chrono Trigger.

D’Angelo: That was definitely the main inspiration for it. We were thinking, “Oh, what should happen when you walk in there? Oh, it’d be fun if you walk in there and they’re just having dinner,” or something stupid. And then they’re like, “Mina, sit down.” And then it just felt like a good idea upon a good idea naturally happening. “Oh, we could do the court scene from Chrono Trigger.” No one’s touched that. No one’s touched that in decades. And then, “Oh, what would be the spin on it? How about they’re saying all the things you did?” It just played so well into the themes of the game and the fun of an RPG and the fact that you could do anything at any time, that it just felt like we struck gold.

That also just feels very ambitious. The whole game is tracking you in a million ways, but confronting the player with all the ways it’s been tracking you is a little unnerving.

D’Angelo: At first we didn’t really know how to do it. What do we actually show? What do we actually say is bad or good? And do we take screenshots? Do we do Mother- or Earthbound-style, someone’s there and takes a picture? Should we signal that it’s happening?

The way we ended up is we actually took screenshots of the in-game things and [the art department] figured out how to frame things just right. And that was tricky too because it’s like you could have been using the hammer when you got to that scene. So it’s like, “Oh, what should the character be doing? They should be jumping in that scene,” because everyone can jump. And we wanted them to be framed and planned instead of doing a screenshot thing. But it’s figuring out just the complexity of, “How can we show that and make it make sense?”

And we had things that you might have done at the start of the quest but not the end of the quest, so what part of the quest do we even show? A lot of those images that show up, when we playtested, people would see that image and go, “I didn’t do that.” And it was like, “Oh, why did they think they didn’t do that?” Because they did. I’m looking at their save file and they definitely did it. So we had to make sure we’re like … the text is saying just the right thing so they understand and that the art is showing just the right thing. And sometimes you just forget that you did it, which is okay.

I just kept hitting the “more” when they asked, “Do you want to hear even more of your crimes?” And I’m like, “Yes, keep going.”

D’Angelo: Yes. If you do every bad thing you can do in the game, he’ll say at most like under half of them. There’s a lot.

I just have to say it’s funny that this is such a cute presentation and it’s pixel art and you wouldn’t think of that as scary, but I have yelled at this game. Like when the Carving Man appears in the underlab.

D’Angelo: That’s wonderful. I think the difference between something being funny and scary is really close. When Carving Man comes down there, we find it really funny. We’re laughing at the idea that that’s happening to a player. So when we were making it, we were just like, “Is this scary? Is this actually scary to someone?”

We worked really hard, and we know because it’s pixel art, it’s much harder and it’s such a small scale, it’s much harder to make something seem creepy or scary. But yeah, I mean we’re like, “Have we hit this kind of scary thing?” Oh, at the beginning of the game, you get brought up on the stage and it’s like, “Oh, people have a public-speaking fear. We should try to get that somewhere in there.” And I’m sure most things don’t click or whatever, but trying to get as much of that stuff in there as possible. “People are afraid of this kind of thing. We should try to represent it in some way.” And I guess whether it comes across as scary or funny is like I hope it’s scary, but if it’s funny, that’s good too.

Yeah. And I think the good thing about that is the more you’re laughing, the more you’re susceptible to being scared because you’re open and you’re in a joyful mood, so a surprise can really take you off guard.

Let’s say that Mina is an enormous success and by critical reception, it has been. But let’s say the immediate reaction is like, “We demand Mina the Hollower 2.” What does the studio do? How receptive are they to pivoting?

D’Angelo: I really don’t know. I mean, we haven’t talked about it, so I’m not sure. But I know everyone wants to make Mina 2. There are things in the game that are alluding to things that we would do in a Mina 2. Even if we made a Mina 2, we might not go with that path, but it’s like, “Oh, this would be a really cool idea for Mina 2. We should hint at where it could go.”

As I was playing, I was thinking, “Well, obviously there’s going to be a DLC campaign where you play as Thorne. You’re obviously going to play as the villain going around sabotaging the generators. That’s going to be the second campaign.”

D’Angelo: Yeah. We know everyone would love to do it one day. Whether that would be something to do next, I’d be really surprised if people were like, “I want to jump right back into Mina.”