An old interview with the creative has rescued a lot of data about the development of one of the best Nintendo 64 games.
It’s hard to forget that piercing “hey, listen!” with every step we took. Our ‘beloved’ fairy in the iconic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time served as a guide and to warn us of dangers, as well as to help us with some puzzles. The character pretended to be a help, although the truth is that on many occasions, his cries reached get on our nerves.
About it and some of the mechanics in the Nintendo 64 classic, Shigeru Miyamoto himself, creator of Zelda, spoke in a 1999 interview, originally printed in a Japanese strategy guide that would have been rescued and published online recently, and which has been echoed Eurogamer. In it, the creator talks about how little he liked the character, coming to consider remove her from the game.
“I think the way we give clues is still a little unfriendly“, Miyamoto confessed in reference to the fairy. “I think that the whole system with Navi giving you advice is the biggest weak point of Ocarina of Time“. Miyamoto spoke about how difficult it was to design a system that provides the right advice, managing to adapt to each player’s situation.
Miyamoto worried about wasting too much time on the help system“To do it right, you would have to spend the same amount of time you would spend developing a full game,” he explained, expressing his concern about how they could have ended up “sinking in a well” if they had pursued a level of perfection like that. “Navi, repeats the same things over and over again. I know it sounds bad, but we left it on purpose as some kind of ‘stupid’ aspect. I think if we had tried to make the Navi suggestions were more sophisticated, that ‘stupidity’ would have stood out even more.”
The creative came to recognize that wanted to remove the entire hint system from Navi, though he thought that “would have been even more unfriendly to gamers“. Miyamoto justified the inclusion of the character as Help for players who stop playing for a while and then resume the adventure without remembering what they should do, although he joked that this was simply an excuse. The Legend of Zelda saga is one of the most important in the history of video games and even today, we discover curiosities about a game for which almost 25 years have passed. The franchise still has many joys to give us and the closest ones will come with the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
More about: Zelda, Miyamoto, Ocarina of Time and Navi.