In a recent interview with Famitsu, Pragmata director Yonghee Cho got together with indie anime director Kameyama Yohei to chat about the 3DCG art and visual aspects of their respective works. Notably, Cho shed some light on the struggles he and his fellow developers at Capcom were facing when creating the character of Diana, one of the two protagonists of the studio’s upcoming game.
While she looks like a young girl, Diana is actually an android capable of hacking into facility systems and bots, essentially serving as the “puzzle solving member” of the tag team. As a machine, her demeanor, gestures and even voice sometimes venture into “uncanny valley” territory, though (so far) we’ve never seen her android-like features dominate. According to Cho, he originally wanted to have Diana look and feel like a full-blown android, but due to certain restrictions, the devs at Capcom settled for conveying her robotic vibes in a more understated manner, through small gestures and mannerisms.
“When creating a game, you are faced with various regulations, so there are certain barriers that somewhat restrict your expression. We really wanted to pack Diana’s character with many different expressions that would only be possible precisely because she is an android and not a living, breathing human. But we ended up going through a lot of struggles, even when it comes to her visual design.”
Cho suggests that it would’ve been quite challenging for the team to implement more exaggerated and cartoony expressions that would let them freely play around with Diana’s android-like aspects. “It’s really difficult to pull of more straightforward expressions like, for example, how Arale-chan from Dr. Slump literally carries her head off her body.”
Talking about “decapitations” and similar expressions, the director goes on to explain that, since the game was developed with a global release in mind, the developers had to pay attention to how they handled certain topics in a cultural sense. “To be completely honest, successfully implementing edgy stuff into the game is actually quite tough.”
Pragmata is set to launch on April 24, 2026 for PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X❘S, and Nintendo Switch 2. A demo is currently available on Steam.
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