Interview:IGN November 10th 2011

https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/11/11/behind-the-scenes-of-zelda-skyward-sword

IGN: We know that Link will be using a harp in Skyward Sword. Why did you choose a harp for the game? Can you describe musically how it plays into the game?

Aonuma: In the Zelda series music and musical instruments have always played an important role. For the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, from the very beginning what we started to think about was what can we do from a play control standpoint with Wii MotionPlus that would make it feel good for the player to be able to play an instrument," Aonuma told us. "And we experimented with a lot of different instruments but ultimately the conclusion that we came to was that sort of the, the sort of back and forth strumming motion that you do when you play a harp is something that would be very simple for a player to do, to time that to the music.

With that we would be able to allow them to very simply feel good performing music and that was a proposal that we got from the sound team itself and so then we started to look at implementing that. Of course in Ocarina of Time the character Sheik had a harp, but we've taken that harp and now we are allowing Link to play that harp with Wii MotionPlus and allowing the player to play that.

IGN: Specifically regarding music and gameplay, stemming from Ocarina of time up until now players have been able to play instruments in Zelda games. I'm curious how you go about developing music that not only sounds good but at the same time a player can actually recreate on a controller?

Kondo: Well, one example is what we've done in Skyward Sword with the instrument, which I think is different from what we've done in other games, and that is that the harp instrument is something that's capable of playing a melody but it's also kind of capable of playing sort of a harmony or playing along with the song as well," Kondo said. "One thing that we've done in Skyward Sword that's different from how we've done it in the past games is there will be times where you'll be playing songs but the harp is also designed so that you can play it really at any point in the game.

As you kind of strum back and forth you'll play music that will work with whatever background music happens to be playing at that time so actually Link can, while he's running through the world can have the harp out and he can be playing the harp while Link is running around and so I think it's something that's very interesting and is an example of how we're continually trying to look at new ways to apply both instruments and music to the Zelda series.

IGN: Mister Kondo, it's my understanding you had some involvement in Skyward Sword's musical development. How did you determine what musical pieces you wanted to specifically do? Were there certain portions of the game that you were very passionate about that you wanted to handle personally or was it just simply a sort of development resource issue where you just needed to handle some of the music yourself?

Kondo: Actually, this time I only composed one song for the game and it's the song that you hear at the very beginning when you turn the game on and there's the movie that plays that tells sort of the history or the back story of the game. I did the song for that piece but generally when we're working on a Zelda game it's less about what sections do I want to work on, and more of looking at some of the new experiences in the game. We look at those new or fresh moments and how can we bring more people in to provide their perspective on what's going to have sort of the best sound for those moments.

What makes music special in a Zelda game is the idea that, that within those, as the games are changing and evolving and you have those new moments in every game, we're continually trying to find sort of these new perspectives that will help deliver the excitement of those moments to the player.

IGN: So Skyward Sword now features orchestrated music for the Zelda franchise. I was curious, it's my understanding that not every portion of the game is orchestrated so I was curious how you determine what musical, music entries were going to be orchestrated and which ones wouldn't be?

Kondo: So one of the, one of the, what's unique in the characteristics of the orchestra is the grand scope of the music that you get from an orchestra as well as its ability to really kind of express emotion and so what we focused in on with this game was using the orchestra to help really sort of provide that grand epic feel to some of those areas where you have some of the sweeping vistas and things like that and then additionally in things like the cinema scenes and some of the more kind of emotional moments in the game using the orchestra performance to really enhance those moments.

IGN: When I played about eight hours of the game, I noticed this Zelda game feeling different from other Zelda games. Yet it still felt very familiar to me. I am curious if you felt a pressure during the development of the game to make this Zelda different, and whether that was something that you challenge yourselves internally to do or whether you felt that pressure externally. Mister Kondo, did the same apply to you musically? Did you feel the need to make this Zelda game different musically?

Aonuma: Yeah, I wouldn't say that we felt any external pressure to try to change Zelda. After we released Twilight Princess, I really started to sit and wonder whether or not we really should move forward by continuing to use sort of the same processes, and the same style, to create a Zelda game that we have used for some of the more recent titles.

In the case of Skyward Sword, I'm a producer on the title and the director of the game is somebody who is directing a console Zelda game for his very first time - Mr. Fujibayashi. We sat down very early on and I said to him that in creating a Zelda game, what's important is to really try to maintain the uniqueness of a Zelda game that gives it that Zelda feel, but for this game in particular, I told him there wasn't a need to follow the same sort of processes and structures that we've used in creating past Zelda games. I said instead he should feel like he has the freedom to look at it and if he sees anything in there that he felt he needed to change, to go ahead and change it.

So from the very early on we were really thinking proactively about what we could do to change the game and make it feel different. Ultimately what's resulted from all of this is a game that has sort of found that unique Zelda element but at the same time has a number of new ideas. Those elements are both going to make the game feel fresh and at the same time make it something that is I think easy and natural for people to pick up and play - perhaps it will be even easier for them to immerse themselves in the adventure.

Kondo: So not just with Skyward Sword, but really with all of the games, whenever we start working on sound we always try to think what are some different things that we can do musically," he said. "What are some new musical ideas that we can apply? Something that we've done with Skyward Sword that I would say is fresh for this game is we really looked at taking various themes and applying them to the individual characters. So you may hear common themes throughout the game, but they may change depending on who you're near or who you are talking to. Another thing we've done is, as you play deeper into the game you'll find scenes where people are actually singing songs, which is something that we haven't done in Zelda games in the past.

IGN: Looking back over the last twenty-five years of Zelda, how has developing music and sound for Zelda changed? I know it's changed as you moved into more of a supervising role for the games, but overall in terms of the development of music how has it changed?

Kondo: Of course the development tools are something that have changed dramatically over the years, certainly from the very earliest days. Now it's much easier using the advanced tools to be able to take your musical ideas and very quickly translate them into something that can work in the game, which is very nice.

The breadth of options that you have in terms of sounds and sort of the palate that you're able to use is much broader now, which is wonderful because you have so many options in trying to create the music. Where the new challenge comes is among all of the possible options that you have in front of you. It still remains important to take the music you're creating and be able to, from across that broad spectrum of music and notes, bring something together that truly represents both the experience for the player and the emotion that you're trying to convey.

IGN: Typically when movies are being developed, the music and sound comes in after the movie is basically done filming. The composer then goes in, watches the movie and starts composing music to that. I was curious how music is developed for Zelda games. As parts of the game are completed is music completed, or is the music and sound largely done towards the end of the development cycle of a game?

Aonuma: In the past we certainly would work much more hand in hand earlier in the process and as we were developing different parts of the game we would, you know the sound team would create the music and we would put it in there, we would change the music as we progressed through the development.

One of the things that we noticed more recently, particularly as we moved to recording with orchestras is that once you record with the orchestra you can't change the sound anymore. The result of that is that the orchestra recording can't happen until after the sound, the music itself has been relatively locked into place. What that means is generally we have to wait until the game itself is in a relatively stable state, and has most of its elements in place, before they can really start working on the sound and getting it locked in place.

As we're going through the process we do work with a sound team and generally try to kind of get some general themes going through the game in terms of how the music will flow. It has become a bit more of a topic for us, particularly with a game like Skyward Sword, which we've been developing for five years, in terms of when is the right time to bring the sound team in, and lock the music in place, and then go into the recording, and then of course after the recording happens there's still tuning and things that need to happen beyond that.

Kondo: Before it was much easier when we were creating the music on a computer because if something changed in the game we could just very quickly change it in the computer and that would resolve everything. That was of course a new experience for us to be working with an orchestra, where we've already recorded the music. Then something changes within the game that might potentially try to effect the pacing or something of the music, and then you try to find ways to make that work, but it's certainly a new challenge for us.

IGN: Mr. Kondo, I once read that you said that immersion and interaction is more important to the music of a videogame than say something like emotion, which is more important to a movie. I was curious how you find that balance? Like how do you go about finding music that's more about immersion and interaction than say emotion?

Kondo: What's most important when creating music for a game is to look at the game itself and to really see what is that first impression or that first inspiration that you get from seeing the game in motion," Kondo told us. "Of course what's great about that is when you have that strong first impression, it then becomes very easy to put your ideas into a song and you generally are very quickly able to create the music for that scene.

What gets hard is when you look at the game and you don't really get a clear image for what that moment is trying to convey. That's when it takes much longer to create the music for those scenes. What I've found is that over the years with the Zelda series, as the game designers and planners are coming up with new ideas for the game itself, from an interactive nature, I've really kind of challenged myself to also come up with new ideas for how we use the music in the games. I've really felt that working on the Zelda series over the years has really helped to build a great deal of musical experience for me.

IGN: The Zelda series has always been interesting because most action games don't necessarily use interactive music as gameplay. As the years went on, what was it about Zelda that made you really want to use more and more music, and incorporate instruments more into gameplay as time went on?

Kondo: The first time when music and an instrument really became part of the gameplay itself was with Ocarina of Time. When we were working on the game, around that time there were a lot of RPGs and many of the RPGs had some type of magic system that players would use in addition to sort of their sword battling.

While we were working on the game, we had this question of whether magic is something that really belongs in a Zelda game, and if so how would we handle it? The answer that we came up with was that maybe not magic the way it's done in other games, but if we use a musical instrument as way of sort of creating the magic that's in the game, then that's something that might make sense for the Zelda series.

In terms of looking at the controller itself with the buttons on it, the first instrument that came to mind was an ocarina, both you know from the shape and the way that you operate it and so that's how we came to the decision to use the ocarina in that game and that was really sort of the start of music as gameplay in the Zelda series.

IGN: As I'm playing Skyward, I notice myself getting hurt more, and I noticed that instead of starting with three hearts I started with six hearts. Skyward Sword actually seems a little tougher than some of the past Zeldas. Was maybe a deliberate choice this time around or is that just a natural byproduct of the more complex combat and design that you guys have been using this time around?

Aonuma: One of the main things we've wanted to do with Wii MotionPlus and the motion control in this game was not just to have you battle enemies, but to have each battle itself be a puzzle you had to solve. You have to use the sword at the right angles and you had to watch the enemy to figure out their defense system to understand how to defeat it. We really wanted people to through this process kind of gradually get better and better at defeating each specific enemy so that by the end of the game, you're able to very quickly defeat the enemies.

Of course the very first time you face them, the problem is you have to understand the moves they're doing and find a way through them. You don't necessarily find that immediately right away, but at the same time for the battle to be engaging the enemy has to attack you back. So the first time you play, you're not able to defeat the enemy and they're hurting you, and so kind of a natural way of balance that was to give the player more hearts to start with, so that way even if you're fighting an enemy and you're not able to defeat it the first time, you're not coming back and feeling like you're at a complete disadvantage. We wanted to give you a little bit more motivation to keep trying and figure out how to do it.

IGN: You mentioned making combat a puzzle in terms of how to defeat the enemies. I noticed that the overworld itself, say when I enter Faron Woods, before the dungeon, that has become its own puzzle - almost an extension of the dungeon. What lead you to that design choice? Traditional Zelda games use an open field and then move to the dungeon. Now it feels like much of the game is a dungeon.

Aonuma: I think the real thought behind trying to do more in terms of the puzzle solving in the overworld really came from Twilight Princess. In that game we had this massive overworld, but you would get into the dungeons and the dungeons themselves were also quite large. Looking at that I was like well why do we have this great massive overworld and these great big dungeons? What's the purpose and the difference between the two of those?

I think what we've realized is you particularly want people to be able to experience some sort of change in the environment that they're in. That draws interest in the game, I think, but it's difficult in very small areas to have people experience a dramatic change and have it feel impactful. So what we looked to do this time was really try to take the sort of the puzzle solving and really spread it throughout the game. One of the main themes that we had with Zelda: Skyward Sword was this idea of really exploring the world that you're in and so to do that we spread the puzzle solving throughout the overworld as well.

We kept the dungeons with sort of that gameplay idea of get the key, unlock the door, move onto the next room, but kept those a little bit more compact I think than they've been in maybe Twilight Princess. At the same time we sort of blurred the line between what was a dungeon and what was overworld. The idea being that the whole game would feel like this world that you need to explore, one where you can still see the results of your actions having an impact on the world around you.

IGN: Where did the focus on the sky come from? How about the Loftwings?

Aonuma: In terms of deciding to use the sky theme and the bird theme, it really started with that idea that we didn't need to have a big large field that you just simply move through to get to places," Aonuma told us. "That's not a compelling use of the land and the terrain. What we started to think about was the way that the Mario games are structured. You sort of have this simple map that you can move around, and then it opens up into the next level or the next course that you work your way through.

One of our ideas was what if we have a means where you can very quickly get to the area that you're going to be exploring? That should work great, but when trying to find a way to apply that to a Zelda game, where still you need to feel like you're in a cohesive world. One of the things that we thought would be great is if you have this one area that you always continually go back to, and then from that area you're quickly and easily able to get to the other areas in the world.

In that sense it made sense to have that area be up in the sky, and then you would drop down from the sky to any of the areas below that you wanted to get to. But then as we were thinking about it more we thought well, it's just kind of silly that you would just drop out of the sky and land down below and you need to have some kind of mechanism for travelling around and that's where the idea of the birds came in.

IGN: There are twenty-five years of history of Zelda and millions of fans have come to love certain things about it. If I'm on a Loftwing, people are inevitably going to say "where's Epona?" And if I'm traveling through the sky and I don't hear the Hyrule overworld theme people are going to say well "where's that music?" Do you ever feel restricted in the sense that people really want some of these things in every single Zelda game? Do you feel that pressure in terms of making sure these classic elements are in the games?

Aonuma: I'll let Kondo-san talk about the music afterwards but from my perspective, and Ifeel kind of bad saying this, but I generally don't try to take into account the players expectations of what they want from a Zelda game when making a new one.

The reason for that is… players don't necessarily know what they want - we need to be able to surprise them. So where we put a lot of our focus is on creating those new experiences that are going to make the game feel fresh and different. At the same time we're trying to retain what makes a Zelda game unique. Where we might kind of pay a little bit of attention to details like that is less about how can we deliver what we're expecting and more about how can we betray their expectations. That might be through new ideas. It might be taking elements they want and expect to be in there, and putting them in the game in a way that surprises them - or in a place where they're not expecting it.

I think a good example is taking some of those themes or elements and having them tucked away in a place where somebody's not expecting to find it. Then when it does pop up, it's a big surprise for them. From my perspective it's really less about trying to meet all of their expectations, because trying to put everything that everybody wants out of a Zelda game into one game is going to be very difficult. At the same time focusing more on new elements is where the importance is for me, but still working with our team and conveying to them the importance of keeping some of those little touches in there that will keep people happy and at the same time surprise them.

Kondo: Well I've worked on all of the Zelda games up to Majora's Mask and after that it's been more of the younger composers that have been creating the music for the game and they I think have always sort of struggled with how much of the legacy music do we bring back and retain in the new games and how much of it do we create new and my advice to them is always you know, you need to, you need to be able to judge and say that you know, we need to do new things musically and both you know with the themes and things like that but find sort of again those moments that we can still leverage, you know, the classic Zelda themes and some of those classic melodies while still trying to find a way to breathe new life into them.

A good example of that is the main theme for the game. This time when you play it backwards is actually Zelda's lullabye and I was really happy to find out that the team had done that and a little disappointed that the news broke so soon before launch.

IGN: We just stare at the trailers over and over again until we figure it out, so…

Kondo: But it was, that was something that some of the younger composers decided that they wanted to do and I thought was a great way for them to look at both the sort of the legacy music but also find a way to include sort of a little puzzle solving element in the music in the game itself.

IGN: So speaking of classic elements and sort of the you know trying to decide what you keep, what you take out, the omission of Ganon actually struck me as a very interesting one and you know I've read a lot about how difficult it was for you guys to decide how to do combat in the game and sword play, whether it was with Wii MotionPlus or not Wii MotionPlus and I was curious if omitting Ganon from the game was actually a very difficult decision for you guys because everyone you know, everyone expects Link, everyone expects Zelda and everyone kind of expects Ganon, so I was curious how difficult a decision that was?

Aonuma: Well, of course. From early on we were thinking that this was going to be the earliest story in the Zelda series, and it didn't really make sense for us to have Ganon appear in this game," Aonuma told us. " Obviously he makes his first appearance later and that would kind of confuse things, and so in terms of determining, 'well then what are we going to do with who the antagonist in this game is,' the answer that we came up with is this kind of strange character, Ghirahim, somebody who you can't really tell is a man or a woman.

So he's sort of this character throughout the game that you're fighting against who plays the antagonist role but his ultimate goal is trying to revive a greater more evil being than himself. So, you know, that's perhaps something that might later have connections to Ganon and things like that, but from early on in this game, we knew that that wasn't going to be the focus with this story.

IGN: Over the past twenty-five years of working on the Zelda franchise, what would you say stands out as your fondest memory or greatest achievement when working on the series?

Kondo: Well, for me it's the concert tonight. It's been a dream of mine for a long time to have my music performed all around the world by a large orchestra and so for us to be able to have that happen right now is really great.

Aonuma: I'm really happy that it's in the twenty-fifth anniversary series that we're able to release Skyward Sword. I've obviously been working on the series for a long time and thinking about sort of what I think a Zelda game should be, and I feel like, although it's perhaps taken me a bit longer than maybe some people would like, I've gotten to the point where I feel that Skyward Sword is the answer to that and it's a game that I myself, I think I can say, I think is a very, very good game and for that to come out is sort of the kind of the penultimate moment of the twenty-five year history so far, and of course hopefully there will be many more years to come but to kind of put that exclamation point on the franchise in the twenty-fifth year to me is I think, makes me very happy and I think a great achievement, and I hope everybody will give the game a try.