The Indiegogo fundraiser for Yatagarasu Attack on Cataclysm continues to move along at a nice pace, and recently surpassed its $20,000 milestone. To celebrate reaching this goal, Nyu-Media released an additional image of new character Azure, who is set to be voiced by Attack on Titan’s Kaji Yuki.

In order to gain some insight on the project, Rice Digital recently conducted an interview with Hotapen, the three-man development team behind Yatagarasu comprised of ex-SNK employees. They discuss a wide variety of topics, including Street Fighter III’s influence on the game, their thoughts on the fighting genre’s increase in popularity, positive western reception, and more.

We’ve included a couple of excerpts from the interview below, but you can check out the whole thing on Rice Digital.

Do you think fighting games should become increasingly more complicated – or should they try to be more accessible to new users?

I think there is no one particular answer to this.

No developer would be unhappy with getting more audience, I guess everyone wants to get more users to access to their games.  However, it is a different matter whether the game is actually interesting, if it was made in a way that everyone would like it.

You wouldn’t be able to make an interesting game if you don’t clearly decide who your target are.

It also depends on what the maker’s situation is like – companies make their games as business, so they would try to target a range of people, whereas the majority of individuals are not making their games for financial purposes.  Therefore the latter would not need to set sales quotas, and would be able to target more specific audience.

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Yataragasu has been well received by the western Fighting Game Community – has this surprised you?

It indeed surprised us.  As we are such a small team, there is no way that we could export our game to overseas.  So we are very pleased that there are lots of players in Europe who enjoy our game.  We will continue to make games in the future, so it would be great if you could keep checking us out.

We rarely know anything about the game scene in Europe, so reports from Rice Digital are great source for us to know about European scene.

By the way, Japan Expo in France is very well known in Japan.  We are hoping to go there one day.

And finally, we received a few videos from John Grimm that feature some great high-level play of Japanese players Hiya and Narukami. If you would like to see more of the game before contributing to their fundraiser, definitely watch these videos to see what Yatagarasu is all about.

The Yatagarasu Attack on Cataclysm donation drive currently sits at $23,473 with thirty-five days left to reach their $68,000 goal. Be sure to visit their Indiegogo page if you’re interested in helping out.

Source: Indiegogo, Nyu-Media, Rice Digital, Hiro via John Grimm