Interview:Game Informer October 2011

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Game Informer October 2011

Date

October 2011

Interviewee

Interviewer

Game Informer

Description

Game Informer exclusive Skyward Sword coverage

Source

[1]

Aonuma: The problem is that when you do something once in a game like Ocarina of Time, when you make the next game it becomes expected that all of that is there. You end up spending a lot of time creating all these elements of the game just to meet expectations.

[One of my goals with Skyward Sword is to] take the franchise into new places.
Aonuma: A number of people working on Zelda now are people that grew up playing Zelda. From their perspective, they're looking at it as, 'What are some of the things that failed to be helpful in getting through the game?' They're stripping that out and streamlining.
Aonuma: I went to university at essentially an art school, but I wasn't studying art per se. I was really doing more sort of craftwork, particularly creating wooden puppets. As I was wrapping up school, I realized that really wasn't something that would be easy to get a job with. Mr. Miyamoto was in on my interview session, and he saw the puppets that I made, and he thought they were pretty interesting. I think I won him over with my puppets.
Aonuma: [Skyward Sword director Hidemaro Fujibayashi] has a fairly young team that hasn't been involved in a lot of Zelda games before. One of their objectives from the beginning was that they wanted to do things in Zelda that haven't been done before. They spent a lot of time coming up with ideas for new interactions in the Zelda series.
Aonuma: Obviously we've made so many games now that we can't help but think about how those games connect to one another. However, that consideration comes late in the development process. When we create a new game, we don't start with a preset notion of what the story is going to be or how it's going to flow. We start by focusing in on what the core gameplay element is going to be and then develop from that.

There is a document on my computer that has a stamp on it that says "Top Secret." I actually haven't even shown it to many of the staff members. One of the special privileges of being the producer of the series is that I have the right as we're finalizing the game's story to then decide where it fits in.

[Aonuma says he is afraid that revealing the official Nintendo timeline would lead future Zelda teams to focus on the story more than the gameplay.] People start to focus in on the storyline and gaps in the timeline. [This is a] backward way of creating a game.
Aonuma: Wakai actually created that Zelda's Lullaby played backwards in the Skyward Sword main theme]. He did it secretly and didn't let me know. It wasn't just a matter of them being silly or playing around but really looking at what they can do with the music that would draw on the rich musical history of the series but still offer something new. The main theme is called 'The Goddess' Song.' There is an intentional connection between the Goddess and Zelda, so we wanted those two songs to relate to one another.
Wakai: It'll [an original composition by Koji Kondo] be the song you hear before actually starting the game. Mr. Kondo did something interesting with the arrangement. He requested that when we record it with the orchestra, there must be a bugle that sounds as if it's coming from off in the distance. When you hear that sound in the prologue, what sounds almost like a military bugle, it adds this great feeling to it.
Aonuma: We've been talking a lot about how we're trying to make this Zelda game feel new and different, but there will come a point in the game where you'll still get that final feeling that this is still a Zelda game.
Aonuma: [On an HD Zelda for the Wii U] It's not something they're working on daily right now, but we are taking time periodically to sit down and think about some of the things we might be able to do with that system. The demo that we showed at E3 was really just more of a rough idea of if all we were to do was to take a Zelda game and put it in HD, this is what it might look like. We're much more interested in looking at the power of the Wii U system and seeing how we can take advantage of that power to do things that we haven't been able to do in a Zelda game before.

[On an original Zelda title for the 3DS] Of course we've thought about it. I'll give you one hint, but maybe you won't understand it. It will be a game in which having 3D will mean something.