When talking about the development cycle for Hyrule Warriors, we’ve known for a while that there were puzzles and dungeon like settings in the initial concept design. What we didn’t know was that it was none other than Shigeru Miyamoto who vetoed the entire concept. Miyamoto isn’t too heavily involved with the series anymore, but when he speaks up you generally are going to listen. Hyrule Warriors was going to be a very different game originally—a Zelda game with Warriors elements, instead of a Warrior game with Zelda elements.

“At first, when Hayashi-san approached me, he wanted to make this title closer to a Zelda game than a Dynasty Warriors game — that extended to having boss battles in the dungeons and [having] certain characters in the game. However, Mr. Miyamoto came along and up-ended the tea table, saying, “No, that should not be the case. What we’re doing here is grafting Zelda onto the Dynasty Warriors experience.” It was a reversal of the original proposal from Hayashi-san, which was adding elements of Dynasty Warriors onto the Zelda franchise. It ended up being the other way around based on Miyamoto’s direction.”

— Eiji Aonuma

Yosuke Hayashi also chimed in about how they took Miyamoto’s advice:

“This relates a bit to when Mr. Miyamoto stepped in to overturn the tea table. It was really trying to strike that balance of making a game that Zelda fans will enjoy that is different from a typical Zelda game, that has enough elements that people will enjoy but also not losing Zelda fans. We ourselves are Zelda fans as well, so we had to ask ourselves the question of what is it that makes a Zelda game, and how many of those elements do we need to include. Up until the very end, we kept adding different elements to the game until we struck a balance that we were happy with.” — Yosuke Hayashi

How do you feel about the final direction of the game?

Source: Nintendo Life

Sorted Under: Zelda News