DokoGaTV recently did an interview with mecha designer Shoji Kawamori and it makes for very interesting viewing. Considering that Kawamori is very prolific in both anime and games, his take on how he went about handling the designs for Armored Core are particularly enlightening and that the use of “core” in the game title’s name is by no means an accident either. It also again shows how integrally linked mecha gaming is to the overall pantheon of mecha and that it very often has a tangible functional outcome. Separately, he talks about his early work on Transformers (or Diaclone as it was originally known in Japan) and his hand in creating possibly the most well known design, that of Convoy (or Optimus Prime). His comment about how the mecha in the recent live action Transformer’s films operate, in that they use henshin (shapeshifting) rather than henkei (modular transformation), was also quite interesting as well as being depressingly very accurate.