At Tokyo Game Show 2025, we had another chance to check out Pragmata, Capcom's upcoming new IP starring a spaceman and an android companion in the form of a little girl named Diana trying to escape a rogue AI on the moon. We also got a chance to talk to the game's creators and learn some interesting stories from the game's development, including that Diana was once, among other things, a talking dog.
This comes from our interview with game director Cho Yonghee, where I asked him how the characters of Diana and Hugh were conceived. First, he told me that Diana wasn't always riding on Hugh's back. At one point she walked next to him, but this caused issues with the gameplay as two characters moving separately was tricky to manage. So she hopped on board, making Pragmata's mix of gunplay and hacking possible.
But when I pressed Yonghee on the characters' origins, he told us an interesting story about Diana's conception:
"So early on, Diana wasn't this young girl android," he said. "We'd gone through various ideas with it being a animal or a robot or various different things before we landed on something that we felt that would click. So it's not that it's just we wanted to have a little girl, we wanted have just a little child basically you can protect and you can follow around basically. So that's how it began."
I asked him what sorts of animals were considered, to which he said "Dog." And when I asked if the dog could talk, like Diana does...
"Yes, a talking dog."
So there you go. If we use our imaginations, we can picture a version of Pragmata where tough spaceman Hugh is clomping around the moon with a talking dog riding on his back. How that talking dog got on the moon is anyone's guess - maybe it's better that Capcom went with the little girl android route for this one.
We recently got another look at Pragmata at Capcom's Online Program alongside TGS, and we had a hands-on preview of the game at Gamescom earlier this year. It's out sometime next year.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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