Eiji Aonuma Says Hyrule Warriors Was Part of His Vision for Rethinking Zelda Conventions

Do you folks remember January 23rd, 2013? That is the day The Wind Waker HD (The Wind Waker HD Walkthrough) was announced. More importantly for today however, it was the day we suspected Zelda U was sort of announced as in development. Eiji Aonuma had two big points when talking about Zelda games, and those were rethinking the conventional order of doing dungeons and playing the game alone. It turns out, neither of those points may have actually implied anything for Zelda U.

In A Link Between Worlds (A Link Between Worlds Walkthrough) we were able to do dungeons in almost any order we wanted to thanks to the item rental system. Today, according to Aonuma, we now know that Hyrule Warriors was part of that thought process too, more than likely in regards to playing a Zelda game alone.

Aonuma also mentions that this ties in with his earlier words, when he expressed his desire to change the mindset of having The Legend of Zelda stick to its traditional roots. For this reason, he felt that Hyrule Warriors would make things interesting.

“The Legend of Zelda has a history of 27 years, and the way it is played has already been well-established,” says Hayashi. “So at first, we went in the direction of wanting to make something that could follow the way The Legend of Zelda is played.”

“However, that is something you could experience by playing any game of The Legend of Zelda series, and even if we could imitate the surface of it, it’s not something we could actually make. In the end, we realized that it would be best to make a Warriors title that has elements from The Legend of Zelda series.”

Aonuma adds, “There wouldn’t be a reason for making it a Warriors [game] otherwise, right? I wanted Tecmo Koei to make a Zelda game that I can’t make. And for this reason, I asked them to ‘give it more of a Warriors approach’.”

The team behind Hyrule Warriors went on to detail how exactly things worked out the way it did:

“When it comes to getting a good feeling out of beating down enemies, Omega Force, who develop the Dynasty Warriors games, would surely have an edge in that department,” says Koinuma. “However, as far as one-to-one combat goes, I felt that that Team Ninja, who worked on the Dead or Alive series, could also come up with something good. So, we just decided ‘let’s just mix them together!’”

Famitsu asks if Tecmo Koei had any trouble working with an IP such as The Legend of Zelda, in terms of what they could and couldn’t do.

“When we first began working on the plans [for the game], there were many things that we couldn’t decide on from within our company alone, so we often went to Nintendo and also consulted with Aonuma for the more detailed parts,” explains Hayashi. “As this process went on, we were able to see a fine line between what we could and couldn’t do with Hyrule Warriors.”

“It got to the point where we and Aonuma reached a common understanding of what we could do with Hyrule Warriors, and from there, development really really sped up.”

You can check out our Hyrule Warriors Walkthrough for more information on the game.

Source: Siliconera