Interviewer (Kenji Nakamura): How was Bridget born?

Ishiwatari is the creator of the GUILTY GEAR series and has been involved in the
production of all titles.

Ishiwatari: When we were going to release GUILTY GEAR in arcades, we were adding
new characters, and I actually had an acquaintance who was the #1 yo-yoer in the
world, and I was told that I should make a new character based on them.

And so, that acquaintance came over to my house and showed me yo-yo tricks, but
then we figured it would be better to do it in public in the park, so we moved there, and
they showed me the tricks there.

Once we did that, all the kids who were in the park all gathered around them. Seeing
such an amazing sight helped inspire the character.
Bridget uses yo-yos to attack.

Interviewer: Was there anything you struggled with when making yo-yos a weapon?

Ishiwatari: Because there are so many kinds of yo-yos and so many tricks that could
be considered basic, we had all the staff buy yo-yos they liked and practice on them.
Honestly, it hurts! Everyone played with them until they got bruises.
Mr. Katano is the development director of GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE-.

Katano: In the GUILTY GEAR series, characters are able to express their personalities
by using all kinds of weapons, not just swords and blades. Anchors and pool cues, etc.
And so having yo-yos, you know, I thought it was the kind of thing we could only do
here.
Interviewer: Bridget first gained popularity as a femboy character, but how did you end
up creating a character like that in the first place?

Ishiwatari: Generally, the source of all of my inspiration is the thought “I want to do

something different.” As long as I’m not feeling a strong sense of “I want to make
something exactly like that,” even if it’s something maybe I’ve seen somewhere before, I
think it should have something different about its identity, is my way of thinking.

Interviewer: There are rumors you changed the character to a boy because it would be
bad to have a girl hitting people and getting beat up

Ishiwatari: No, at the time of Bridget’s first appearance, compliance wasn’t that strict.
From about the previous production, the marketing team had become pretty aware of
the overseas market, and was thinking more about a more global compliance, but I had
been more concerned with the initial impact of her appearance, the impact, and the
emotions you could get from her story.

Interviewer: So it wasn’t a clearance problem.

Ishiwatari: To be honest, the things that got caught in compliance at the time, there
were a lot of them that I thought were strange.

Bridget is one of those characters, but there’s another character, Baiken, who has been
in the game since the start. She’s missing an eye and an arm, but I was actually told
having a character with those attributes wouldn’t pass. I couldn’t convince them
otherwise, and there was a lot of pressure to change the character.
Baiken is a popular character who has appeared since the first Guilty Gear game. At a
young age she lost her right arm and left eye.

Ishiwatari: However, I really felt like that part of the character was important, and so I
would purposefully not write it in character introductions, and not really touch on it, while
at the same time continuing to make use of that element.
The truth is, some of the characters that appear, I expressly tried to create
characters that were a minority in some way, because I wanted to make heroes
for those kinds of people. At the time, there was pushback, but now we’re able to be
very public about it, and have it greeted happily instead.

Interviewer: What did you think regarding Bridget’s gender at the time she first
appeared?

Ishiwatari: At this point in her story, she’s thinking that she doesn’t want to worry the
people around her or cause problems. I think that at that point in time, Bridget herself
was trying her absolute hardest to not think things like, ‘Maybe I actually am a
girl.’
The interview was held in a conference room in Arc System Works.

Interviewer: I heard that at the time, some of the development staff didn’t know the
character was male until right before the game went on sale.

Ishiwatari: It’s true (laughs). At the time, there was about 10 staff total, and one of the
artists who mainly handled backgrounds drew a lot of doujinshi as a hobby. And so I
told him, “We’re making this character,” and he immediately jumped into action to start
making a doujinshi. Then afterwards, he found out the character was male, and came to
me like, “What the hell am I supposed to do about my doujin?” (Laughs).
Interviewer: What made you decide to have Bridget appear again, 10 years after her
last appearance?

Katano: She has always been very popular domestically, and she was included as a
candidate for a return, but we didn’t plan on putting her in at the start. However, as
things progressed, we started realizing we wanted all the characters to appear again,
and so then she was a candidate again.

Interviewer: Were there any worries or complications around adding Bridget?

Ishiwatari: The truth is, I didn’t actually change anything about the character in this
game. What I did change in this new game was unifying her character design, outfit
etc., giving her a sense of realism. You know, how would a nun outfit work in reality?
Could you walk down the street like that? How would you move?

The visuals in the game are very anime-like, and so I tried to avoid having the
disconnect you feel when you see a character walking around normally in an outfit you
could never actually wear. I searched for an outfit that could work as normal clothes,
and that’s how the current design came about.
Left: Bridget’s original outfit. She wears a nun outfit. Right: Bridget’s new outfit. She
wears oversized clothes to hide the width of her shoulders and size of her arms, and her
design also hides the back of her hands and her Adam’s apple

Interviewer: Bridget’s new design has been very well-received.

Ishiwatari: Honestly, I wasn’t trying to make a design that would get this much
coverage. However, I was amazed to see people point out specific parts that I
particularly paid attention to when drawing, ‘if the character was a boy, it would be
like this’ or ‘I wanna do this.’

Interviewer: So you designed the character trying to capture the specific features of a
male body?

Katano: I think that a character with a female body wouldn’t have the same
design.

Ishiwatari: Yeah. It feels sort of like how everyone is paid attention to specific elements
of the design that I came very naturally.

Katano: This isn’t just about Bridget, but we often talk about how passionate modern-
day fans and users are when it comes to analysis and investigative ability.
The symbol near her forehead has changed from the male symbol (♂) to the
transgender symbol.

Interviewer: Were there any points of the design you were especially particular about?

Ishiwatari: If anything, she has a transgender symbol on her head, but that was
originally a male symbol. I had a clear intention when changing that. So that was
something I was especially particular about.

When I drew the roughs of Bridget, I had already drawn her with the transgender
symbol, but the person in charge of cleaning up the model sheets for modeling came to
me and asked, “Is this symbol OK?”. She was actually drawn once with the old
design, but I had them go back to my design
Interviewer: You say she already had the transgender symbol on her design when you
drew the roughs, but when did you conceptualize this end to her story?

Ishiwatari: The general direction for the end of her story was already decided
when she first appeared, and it hasn’t changed since.

Interviewer: So you’ve had this in mind since she was created?

Ishiwatari: I don’t know if it had such an important meaning as it does now, but
Bridget’s story, on a structural level, it’s not super dramatic, but I had most of the
content decided already, yes.

Katano: We don’t just suddenly decide to change the story. This isn’t just about Bridget
either, all the character stories and messages are decided in advance.

Interviewer: Awareness of transgender people is much more prevalent now, and so in

a way, it’s like the times have finally caught up with the story you wrote for Bridget all
those years ago.

Ishiwatari: That’s a much cooler way to say it, but I had a strong feeling of now being
the time when I can finally properly express this.

Katano: Every single character has details and story that Ishiwatari came up with in
advance, and for a lot of those it’s a matter of we just haven’t used them yet. I think
with Bridget, it’s really just that.
Interviewer: Perhaps it was pretty good timing to have her come back now, then.

Katano: Maybe, yeah.

Interviewer: Did you imagine there would be this much argument after her
reappearance?

Katano: To be blunt, we did expect it – or we did think it would be a topic there

would obviously be disagreement on. Lengthwise it’s very short, but within the game
story, we wanted to illustrate how she lives, what she worries about, and how she
thinks.

However, a discussion really focused on this issue came first, and people who didn’t
buy the game and don’t play the game really fanned the flames. We saw a lot more
people misinterpreting the messages we were putting out, and even going so far
as to imitate us.

Normally, we would just say that we want you to play the game and experience the
story, our message is this and we want you to understand it, even if each person might
have a different interpretation. However, with people going so far as to impersonate
us, we felt we had to make an official announcement.
Ishiwatari: We made the announcement after a discussion in the company regarding
the need for such an announcement, but the biggest reason was that globally it was
an issue that we didn’t make our position clear, regardless of what position it
was.

We had users saying that we were the ones that triggered all of this, and there was a
large chorus of, “it doesn’t matter which way it goes, just please officially give us
an end to this discussion.”

Interviewer: So, as you work to expand internationally, you put out the official
announcement in order to settle the situation?

Ishiwatari: I don’t know if settle is the right word, but by putting out the information we
did, I saw that some users were able to find a kind of relief in that.
Bridget merchandise in the conference room

Interviewer: I do feel that it’s kind of dumb that as a creator, you’re forced to go out of
your way to explain things like this.

Katano: We had Bridget’s story in the game, and so we did want to just say ‘play the
game and find out yourself’, but just saying that invites an irresponsible amount of
discussion, so we didn’t have any opposition to clearly stating our stance. However, as
creators, much of the worry and opposition was to the idea of putting the
conclusion to the story, the spoilers, on the official site.
Bridget merchandise in the conference room

Interviewer: Is there a specific message you want to send using Bridget?

Ishiwatari: Rather than wanting to send a message using Bridget, what I can say is that
when creating characters and deciding who gets what, I put a little bit of my own
sensibilities in each of the characters. They carry those responsibilities.

For example, if everyone in the world became vegetarian, you can say there would be
good things about that, but from the opposite viewpoint there would be problems and
demerits to the situation. When I see a discussion like that, I think both sides are valid,
and my stance is that I want to cheer on both sides when I can.
From that standpoint, the root of what I want to do is I find all kinds of topics and think,
people with this background, I want to give them a story that has a so-called ‘happy
ending,’ that has a traditional course. Rather than using Bridget to say something, my
hope is that I can continue to create, even abstractly, a vision of what happiness
looks like for people in all different kinds of situations.

Interviewer: So you’re aware of diversity when you work?

Ishiwatari: I’ve been aware of diversity for a long time. Diversity is a really modern
word, but I want to make something where lots of different kinds of people can
become heroes and heroines.

Katano: The GUILTY GEAR series has been going for 20 years with that theme.
The reception area at Arc System Works.

Interviewer: What is the overall theme of the GUILTY GEAR series?

Ishiwatari: To put it simply, it’s a celebration of humanity. The root of my thought

process is that our extremely imperfect situations are what makes us human.
Thinking about it in a more modern way, with the proliferation of smartphones, and a
continued prioritizing of what’s efficient and what’s convenient, I think that we’re losing
some parts of what make us human, including our failures and our sins.

I think what lies ahead of that is a time where what we thought of as human becomes
human no longer, more like an alive computer instead. You won’t need to think for
yourself anymore. Right now, it’s things like not having to drive anymore, but as those
continue to pile up, we won’t need to think. We won’t need to write. My response to that,
my antithesis, I guess you could call it, is that isn’t it more fun being human?
Alright then, what is humanity? I think it’s not being perfect. No one is perfect and
everyone is imperfect and has flaws, or has parts of themselves not everyone will
accept, if we can create heroes for those kinds of people, maybe we can make
everyone understand each other just a little bit better. That’s the kind of story it is.

Interviewer: Lastly, can you give a message to your fans?

Katano: I want to make it absolutely clear here that the staff here does not change
things based on demand or public opinion. Ishiwatari has themes that he is working
with, and all of us staff members are participating with the full knowledge and
understanding of that. I want to say once again that we will continue making games
while holding dear our convictions as creators
Ishiwatari: I know the subject of this interview was Bridget, but all across the main
GUILTY GEAR story, we have these aspects celebrating humanity, and all the
characters are partly responsible in doing that, so I hope that everyone will be interested
in them as well. If you have a look, you might find one that hooks you – we would love
to have you try out the game.