Eiji Aonuma: I Don’t Want to Make Zelda Easy

Last month, Zelda fans experienced mass anxiety at news of Nintendo mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto’s intent to make the next Zelda game easier. Yet, when The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was announced a couple days ago at E3, it certainly didn’t look easier. Due to the game’s fully-realized motion controls, players will need to attack enemies from specific angles just to injure them.

I was curious about the meaning behind the quote, so I asked Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma during an interview yesterday. He responded in the most straightforward manner possible: “I do not want to make Zelda easier.”

That wasn’t all Eiji Aonuma had to say on the subject. For a long time now fans have been fearing that Zelda is going to get even easier than it already was, mostly in part because of Miyamoto stating as much. However, Eiji Aonuma has finally cleared up what exactly Miyamoto and himself really meant.

“Easy to me does not equal fun,” Aonuma explained. “I want puzzles where people have to think about it, and when they solve the puzzle, there’s that feeling of accomplishment. That’s something that’s really valuable, that concrete feeling that when you accomplish something [in the game], it feels like you’ve done something worth doing. If the game is too easy, the accomplishments aren’t valuable.”

Aonuma also elaborated on the quote from Miyamoto that caused this worry in the first place:

“When Mr. Miyamoto says easy, he doesn’t mean simple. He means easily—this is the difficulty of the language here. It’s accessible, and you know how to do things, if not necessarily what to do. You may have a series of puzzles to figure out, and it may be difficult to decipher the meaning, but it’s not difficult to accomplish what you need to do.”

So to me, it simply appears as if Miyamoto was just referencing the control scheme, and how it will feel more natural versus the game actually being easier. Most people who have played the demo, so far, have stated that the combat and such is already more difficult then it was in Twilight Princess.

[Source: Game Informer]