Interview:GameSpot June 16th 2010

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword Interview: Eiji Aonuma (Wii)

GameSpot interviews executive producer of the next Wii installment in the iconic series to learn more about Link's newest adventure.

(questions were omitted from the video)

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Eiji Aonuma: So this time Link for the first time ever is not just a normal citizen of Earth, he lives on this floating land called Skyloft that's above the clouds, and he's just a normal kid growing up there.

Now Link resides in Skyloft, and he's just your average kid, he doesn't think anything unusual about living on these floating islands, but, unbeknownst to Link, below the Skyloft and below this cloud cover is another land. It's a very dangerous place, it's ruled by evil forces, and one day an event occurs which forces Link to actually travel to that land.

The subtitle, Skyward Sword, is really the event that both reveals the land to Link and leads him on his journey and that's the Skyward Sword. So when he gets that, that's the event, again, that reveals where Link needs to go and what he needs to do.

And so Link is led by this mysterious sword to the land below the clouds and back up to Skyloft and again back below, and while he is journeying back and forth between these two worlds, the mystery of why the worlds have been divided and separated becomes clear to him.

Well, we did have Twilight Princess on Wii, but it was a game that was created for GameCube, so when we brought it to Wii, it wasn't quite the same thing as we are doing now. But when we were making Twilight Princess, one of the things that informed and impacted our development this time was "here are the things that maybe we wanted to do but we weren't quite able to implement in the way that we wanted to, so we were able to actually go back and look at those things again. And of course with the addition of Wii Motion Plus we were able to move our game design forward.

First and foremost is just the ability to wield the sword freely and in the way that you want. As I mentioned before, we were able to do that to a degree in Twilight Princess with the Wii Remote, but now with Wii Motion Plus we're at even higher level of fidelity, so that's one of the things that we focused on right away.

Often with the Wii Remote we have the pointing functionality and previously you needed to point at the screen to aim your bow and arrow or to aim your slingshot, now however with the implementation of the Wii Motion Plus that necessity is no longer there, so you can now hold the Wii Remote up like you would actually more naturally hold a bow, vertically, and aim that way. When you're using the slingshot, you don't have to actively point at the screen. And so thanks to just being able to just being able to use the Wii Motion Plus to aim without actively pointing at the screen itself, it's more of a freer style of gameplay.

We have both -- we have some very familiar items like the bow or the slingshot which I just mentioned, which like I said are very familiar and we've had used before, and now with Wii Motion Plus we've just been able to add some extra fidelity and some gameplay elements to make them more successful and more accessible to users. And in addition to that, we also have items that we've created as a result of Wii Motion Plus. For example, the Beetle is something we thought "hey we're able to do this. What kind of item can we create to take advantage of what Wii Motion Plus brings to the table?" And the Beetle of course is this item that you launch that flies out and retrieves objects for you. So we've got two different examples - one that we've created because we have the Wii Motion Plus functionality, and items which we've maybe tweaked the usage of a little bit because of the Wii Motion Plus functionality.

Well I think that it's such a good fit right now, this control scheme that we've developed this time, that I think this will become the new standard for Link controls, and even if we as a company come up with new hardware or whatnot, I really want to suggest to them that we keep in the Wii Motion Plus "this is how Link swings his sword" and using the nunchuck and saying "this is how Link uses his shield. Please keep this functionality. You're gonna throw us a wrench in the works if you don't allow us keep this." So I'm thinking of standing my ground on that.

In terms of when we're going to release it, obviously what we've done now is we have built a really good solid foundation for the title at this point, and I think especially in terms of the controls. So now what we need to do is start adding elements to the game world and polishing things up, and again, really just tying it all together. And really when E3 is done I really just want to rush home and get started. But it's going to take a lot of time, but Mr. Miyamoto did say they wanted throughout the rest of this year, so they said please give us that amount of time. So obviously we're going to work really hard up to the end of the year, and hopefully, what we want to do is get this out to people as early as possible, so we're hoping for early 2011.

source: http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/zeldawiiworkingtitle/video/6266421