Miyamoto Upended the Tea-Table in Hyrule Warriors

Miyamoto seems to have a reputation of jumping into a game’s development and completely flipping the game around. It appears that Hyrule Warriors was no different. In a recent interview with Nintendo Life, it revealed that when Hyrule Warriors was first being developed, it was originally intended to play more like a Zelda-game with Dynasty Warriors elements, as opposed to what it ended up becoming, a Dynasty Warriors game with some Zelda elements. We can thank Miyamoto for this change and you can make the jump to see the full set of quotes.

Eiji Aonuma: 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.

Hyrule Warriors producer Yosuke Hayashi also spoke about Miyamoto’s involvement.

Yosuke Hayashi: 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.