Capcom recently revealed Remember Me, their upcoming third-person action game, developed in partnership with French studio Dontnod Entertainment. The game’s setting in the city of Neo-Paris certainly stood out in the trailer. According to Dontnod’s creative lead, Jean-Maxime Moris, the city was actually a late choice as the team had originally wanted to avoid using it. Speaking to Joystiq, he said:

Since the beginning, I really wanted to have Remember Me not being all French, for instance. Neo-Paris was a late choice, because we wanted to stay away from it. We had that global warming element to the game. First we thought about Australia or the US, and then we were like, ‘Well, let’s just stick to Paris, because we have all the material, it’s a great city, and it hasn’t been done in the way we wanna do it.’

He went on to elaborate on the game’s setting, and mentioned that the game has a French feel to it, but also made a comment about Japanese cyberpunk culture.

There are French elements to the game, but we wanted it to have some American appeal – kind of really extending the scope of the city, and the characters, and the scope of the robots. And at the same time, there is definitely a Japanese feel to it with the cyberpunk theme. Japanese have been eating cyberpunk for breakfast for 30 years now. Ghost in the Shell, and Akira and all those things.

It’s interesting that he made direct references to popular Japanese cyberpunk media, perhaps the team are fans of those works, and are thinking about them as they go. It’s certainly true that there’s some similarities between the trailer that was shown at Gamescom and a franchise like Ghost in the Shell, so a bit of inspiration may have been gained.