On Eiji Aonuma and looking back on Zelda |
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Concealed under Shigeru Miyamoto's shadow, Eiji Aonuma always looked up to the game designer legend and his past works for inspiration. As Nintendo's successor to Miyamoto, Aonuma had a lot of pressure with his own works on Zelda, he knew that there would be a time that the core fans of the long running Zelda series would grow tired of the entire franchise as a whole. He called this the "gamer drift."Turns out he was right, after hitting the road bump of his developer career with The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. It eventually became a huge commercial flop locally in Japan, after garnering sales way below Nintendo's expectations. There was very little it could offer as groundbreaking, and since then, Zelda became a franchise in distress.
Because of Wind Waker, Nintendo decided to create a task force operation to combat "gamer drift." They analyzed gaming angles, what was cool and what was new, and formulated philosophies to reverse the adverse effects gamer drift had on the Japanese industry. Amazingly, the fruits of their labor have been realized - in the form of the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii.
Both offering different ways of interaction and each revolutionizing the way games would eventually be played, the DS and Wii soon stood as the best-selling consoles in Japan to date, and continue to be an amazing phenomenon in other countries as well, including the U.S. For Aonuma, these two special machines should have been a revelation for his Zelda franchise. However, the problem was how was he going to make Zelda anything new on both platforms?
He looked into the core gameplay of Zelda, how the exploring, combat and interacting with in-game characters and objects went about, and decided this was where he could build a whole new perspective for the gameplay. After hearing the news of "gamer drift" also occurring from Wind Waker sales in the U.S., he was more than determined to save the Zelda franchise from being scrapped all together.
With his Wind Waker 2 concept in the trash, he was almost ready to give up on Link when Miyamoto decided to clue him in on how to deliver the Zelda sequel with the claims of being "more realistic" this time. He took the advice, and discovered that the DS could help him innovate the game both graphically and gameplay-wise. He gave plenty of focus on his DS game, but never found the time to help his The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess development team on the "real" Zelda sequel.
Satoru Iwata, CEO of Nintendo, decided that for the extended delay of the title, they could announce the game as a launch title for the Nintendo Wii and GameCube, in order to appease both market halves. Refocused, Aonuma set to work on making the Wii title as Wii-friendly as possible, but found that the game itself forced gamers to learn the interface, rather than just go and wing it.
Ultimately, the title was well-received in the U.S. and only so-so in homeland Japan. He knew he had a lot more to learn before he could be as knowledgeable as his mentor Miyamoto. But a revelation in his own home enticed him to reconsider his judgement: his own wife found that she couldn't stop playing the game, after deciding to help their son past a scary part of the game. If it's any consolation, you're getting there Eiji.
Via Gamasutra
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