Yesterday, we brought you a bit of information from an interview The Guardian conducted with The Legend of Zelda Director Eiji Aonuma, where he discussed the possibility of flight coming to a future title in the series. After all, Link has already conquered land and sea, right?
Following is a little more of what Aonuma had to say during the interview.
To begin, talk turns as it so often does toward one of Aonuma’s earlier works and perhaps the most revered Zelda game of all, Ocarina of Time. And once more, Aonuma is prepared to apologize for it:
“The Water Temple in the Ocarina of Time was notorious for being very tough to conquer,” he says. “I am most sorry that it was not easy for you to put on and take off the heavy boots; that all the time you had to visit the inventory.
“I am,” he continues, genuine regret evident in his tone, “very sorry about that. I should have made it much easier to switch to the heavy boots.”
Of course, boots aside, the Water Temple remains one of his favorites. Perhaps it’s a sentimental thing; after all, his first job for Nintendo was to design the temples and dungeons for the game in question. Since then, of course, his role has increased considerably, but his background coming into the business was not in video game development.
“At college, I was making wooden dolls,” he recalls. “Not simple wooden dolls, but mechanical dolls, ones that were able to play musical instruments, able to dance. I loved people seeing them and being surprised, watching them wonder how these kind of things could be done, what kind of gimmicks were inside.”
“I did an interview, and had my first encounter with [Nintendo’s chief developer] Shigeru Miyamoto, who happened to love the dolls I brought. He said: ‘If you want to make things like that, Nintendo might be a good place for you to work.’ So that’s how I decided to work for the company.”
This seems in line with what Miyamoto, Nintendo’s EAD General Manager, had said recently about looking beyond official credentials when interviewing applicants.
Aonuma reveals that like Miyamoto, he tends not to play video games for the purposes of relaxation. “Sometimes,” he says, “I hear stories of other developers who play video games in their leisure time in order to remove the stresses of video game-making. I am sorry that I cannot be that kind of hardcore gamer myself. Whenever a lot of people are playing with certain software, I try to play these games because I want to know what’s in them that is capturing so much attention. That’s part of my job, though.”
He reveals an affinity for Professor Layton, and admits that he is not as good at “jump games” like Mario, which was a factor that led to the auto-jump system in the 3-D Zelda titles. “I always miss the point where I should land, and I always cry out and say ‘Wait a minute, is this the end of the whole story? Is there no rescue from that?'”
As far as the new Wii Zelda goes, he is willing to talk about it, but only a little regarding MotionPlus:
“With this attachment, your minute hand movements are more precisely reflected … You can feel it so naturally and so intuitively. It’s not just an improvement over the movement of Link himself: the realisation of your more minute movements on the screen will expand the entire gameplay. I believe that we will be able to offer some great innovations in the new Legend of Zelda.
He also mentions the disruption of the game’s flow when compared to past iterations in the series, but stops himself before saying much else.
Perhaps next time, then.
You can find the full article, in which he discusses what he does do to relax, his desire to surprise players, and more at The Guardian.
