GDC 2007: Eiji Aonuma on Zelda Franchise
The director of Twilight Princess says that much more is possible for the next Wii Zelda.
by Matt Casamassina
March 8, 2007 - The name Shigeru Miyamoto is synonymous with the Mario franchise, but these days gamers have also come to know the name Eiji Aonuma. Nintendo's game director, who helmed such titles as Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess, has created some of the most compelling Zelda titles ever made and is currently working on the DS effort Phantom Hourglass. We recently sat down with Aonuma and chatted candidly about the future of the Zelda franchise.
Nintendo has stressed repeatedly that with Wii it wanted to develop a console that anybody could enjoy and to that end it has also developed a library of games that are simply and easily approachable. Aonuma, however, dismissed the notion that going forward Nintendo would downplay the relevance of epic titles such as Zelda and instead focus its energies on casual-style games.
"Nintendo has come out with games like Wii Sports and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. They're both very different games and the experiences are completely different, but they are both produced by Miyamoto-san," Aonuma said. "It's not as though one is better than the other -- it's just that the overall experiences are very different. They're both fun in their different ways. So it's not as though Nintendo's heading into a more simplified direction. It's all about balance."
With more than a million copies of Twilight Princess sold on Wii in America alone, it's no secret that the franchise is as viable today as it was when Ocarina of Time debuted years ago. And for almost as many years, Aonuma has captained the Zelda charge at Nintendo, but will he continue to be the go-to-guy for all things Hyrule?
"I'm 43 and I'll be 44 very soon so as game creators go I'm kind of up there," he said, laughing. "I'm hoping to nurture those below me and train them to become Zelda creators as well."
Aonuma indicated that Twilight Princess, for as good as it was, is just the tip of the iceberg for what can be done to the franchise on Wii.
Said Aonuma: "Twilight Princess was created for the GameCube first and the Wii version came later. When we approached Twilight Princess and added the Wii compatible features, we tried to take advantage of the initial key features of the Wii, like the pointer and the motion sensor -- because it was a launch title. But moving forward, as we get more used to using the Wii controllers and we get more used to developing for the Wii, you can probably expect even more deeper controls."
Some critics have complained that Twilight Princess played and looked too similar to Ocarina of Time. We asked Aonuma if that was a design choice.
"No, it wasn't my intent at all to make something that looked like or played like Ocarina of Time. I wanted to create something that exceeded Ocarina of Time so that could be why it might seem similar. And some of the staff that worked on Ocarina of Time also worked on Twilight Princess, so that might have impacted it as well. But my goal was to create something new," said Aonuma.
Quizzed on whether or not there is room for visual improvement to the Zelda series on Wii, Aonuma responded: "With the Wii version of Twilight Princess, I was creating the Wii version of a GameCube game and wanted to make them similar, so I didn't use the Wii graphics capability to its full capacity. We could actually do a lot more with that and I'm looking forward to doing that."
We asked Aonuma why Twilight Princess didn't feature an orchestral soundtrack.
"i think you're probably talking about the comment I made at E3 about using fully orchestrated background music for Zelda. [Omitting that] was actually a conscious decision we had to make because of development timing," said Aonuma. "It's something that Kondo-san [the game's composer] is very frustrated about -- he really wishes we could have implemented that. So I'm hoping you'll look forward to that in future Zelda games."
Finally, we brought up a common gripe: the lack of any major voice acting in Twilight Princess. Unlike orchestral music, which Nintendo seems intent on doing for future games, the company is not yet convinced that characters should talk.
"In regard to voice acting, I made a conscious decision not to give Link a voice because Link is actually the player and to give him a voice would alter the experience for the player so I don't think that that will happen anytime soon. Unless, of course, it benefits the gameplay. It's all about gameplay, so it if benefits the gameplay then we would definitely consider including voice acting," Aonuma said. "There are many games out there that use voice recording and for me, if I were to choose to include voice acting in a Zelda game, it would have to change the game dramatically and make other people realize that it's a completely new way of using voices."
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