Miyamoto on Legend of Zelda's swordfighting roots, making players better through practice

"When we started this project (Legend of Zelda) many, many years ago with the original NES, it was from the beginning about the sword fighting. Starting actually from the 'Ocarina of Time,' the developers were more eager to make more sophisticated movements of the sword competition." - Shigeru Miyamoto

"When we look at today's fighting games and many other games, sometimes we have to feel it's rather difficult for us to realize the perfect balance between what you are actually doing with your hand against what you can see and realize or reproduce on your TV set. In other words, I really want people to feel, 'OK, I'm doing better and better by practicing, for example, my sword fighting.'"

Link

REVIEW: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

 The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Where does one begin with a game such a this? Skyward Sword is so many things at once. It's the 25 anniversary of the Legend of Zelda franchise, it's the first true proper execution of the Wii Motion Plus technology, and it is also the Wii's swan song. In the process of trying to be so many things at once, one has to wonder if it's lost something along the way. Let's take a look and find out...

Miyamoto still not retiring, Zelda might be good for a Retro collaboration, voice acting talk, new game ideas

“He jokingly mentions retirement to motivate his staff to excel. His ability to focus on smaller projects reflects the confidence he has in all of Nintendo’s development teams … Mr. Miyamoto will continue to provide oversight to those teams and get deeply involved in projects when the situation warrants, ensuring that the quality of Nintendo projects is maintained at a high level. But he will also be able to explore new innovations on his own and in smaller design groups.” - Nintendo statement
A portion of a Wired interview with Shigeru Miyamoto...

Wired.com: It’s come out since Mario Kart 7 came out, there have been some articles about how Retro Studios was very deeply involved in the making of this game, and it’s considered a landmark for the series because you had this collaboration between EAD and Retro. And I’m curious as to whether you think that this would be an interesting model for more games, like a Mario platformer or a Zelda game, to have a Western team and a Japanese team working in close concert to produce a game like that.

Miyamoto: First of all, let me talk a little bit more in detail about how we collaborated with Retro Studios this time. Of course, they were taking care of the game designing aspect. Specifically, they were taking care of the design of the courses and the artwork about that. But when it comes to the gameplay and the control mechanism itself, that’s being taken care of by EAD once again.

People often say that videogames made by Western developers are somehow different in terms of taste for the players, in comparison with Japanese games. I think that means that the Western developers and Japanese developers, they are good at different fields. And that resulted in a different taste in [their games]. Mario Kart, I believe, was good in order to express that kind of different taste because we have many kinds of different courses for the Mario karts to run and race around. So for each of the different courses, we could identify: Retro is supposed to take care of this course, and EAD is going to do that, and such and such. Then, we were able to join forces in order to realize a variety of different courses, a variety of different tastes. I think that’s one reason how it worked out well between a Japanese development team and a Western development team.

As you know, we have already collaborated with Retro for the Metroid Prime series in the past. And I think when we talk about any other franchise, Zelda might be a possible franchise for that collaboration.

Wired.com: So with Skyward Sword, a lot has been said about pushing the series forward with orchestrated music. One of the only complaints I’ve read about the game, and this was something I noticed, is that I think in the five years since Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword… when Twilight Princess came out nobody really said anything about this, but when Skyward Sword came out and the game had no voice acting, it makes an impression now because it’s one of very very few games in that genre which do not have the characters actually speaking in full voice. And I’m curious, I know we’ve probably spoken about this before in the past and I know Nintendo has very deliberate — it’s not a question of technology, it’s a question of artistic style and there are reasons you do it that way. But I’m wondering if there’s any pressure now as games keep evolving to add voices to Zelda to keep it current.

Miyamoto: After all, it’s a question of, what do we really want to make? As the director, of course I want to be getting involved, have direct hands on as many parts and as many things as possible. So it depends upon what kind of direction we are taking for certain projects. For example, if we are pursuing photorealism, I do not think that the director can do a lot — in other words, the staff working on the forefront of development are having their hands on, and the director cannot have their hands on, these details.

But what kind of game, it totally depends on what kind of direction I really want to [take]. And … whether the voice actors should play a key role right now is one of the elements that we’ve got to decide in terms of entirely what things we’d like to make. And talking specifically about the possibility of hiring voice actors to play over the roles of the main characters, we have to ask ourselves, after all, what kind of things do we really need them to speak out? Are they important, and are they really doing anything good for the expanding of the attraction of the Zelda franchise itself?

My opinion is actually against that. I mean, by having the voice actor speaking out the main character’s opinions and messages, I’m afraid that they are going to narrow down the actual characteristics that people can imagine or apply to each character they are controlling, for example. But after all, it depends upon how much work the developer has to show, how many things the director can do, and is it going to do anything good to expand the charm or attraction of The Legend of Zelda? So once again, in terms of all these, if you ask me, isn’t it important for Link and other main characters to speak? I just cannot think so, because of, in terms of what I can do and what Zelda should do.

Wired.com: You’ve narrowed down — you used to do every single game at Nintendo and have input into it and I know recently you’ve narrowed down into a few games that you work on. And all of these games are big retail boxed games that are sold in stores. I see, with Iwata-san talking more about downloadable games and digital games, that becoming more important. I’m curious as to whether you in the near future want to work on games that are smaller, maybe downloadable games, to raise the profile of those games. We see games by the B-teams, but in order to get more people buying games that way, do you feel there need to be Miyamoto download games?

Miyamoto: I just don’t care — as long as I can make something new and interesting, and if it can become a social topic, and spread to so many people, I’ll be working on anything. That’s my attitude. Of course, the situation today is rather different, many companies are simply looking around and seeing what’s trending, what’s hot. Inside that kind of frame, managers demand developers work on similar games. It’s rather difficult for me to say something exact, because unless I can fix my complete idea, I just cannot decide which media is going to be appropriate. What kind of size is going to be appropriate for development. But I think that is actually the right course for us to choose — in other words, developers first come up with a fresh idea. And then, once complete idea is fixed, they should decide, okay, in terms of a new idea, this media is most suited, and the size of the development teams should be just like that.

And after all, I’m aging right now. Yes, I’m in a stage, in a position to be able to take some distance away from the forefront of the development teams right now and see things from a much broader perspective right now. In other words, I think I have many more options than before. In my head, myself. I am now in a position to make things much more freely right now, but the fact of the matter is I have ideas but I have not come to the stage where I can say exactly which one is going to be good for the network games, or what kind of final format shall be appropriate for social gaming. I even have some ideas about Flipnote Studio, things like that, but I [don't] have a complete idea for that. Until I can decide, okay, this is going to be the way each one of these ideas is going to be combined and take shape, I just don’t say that it’s good for digital, it’s good for download. That’s all.

Full interview here

Aonuma/Kondo on voice acting in The Legend of Zelda, Aonuma planning to make the series his own

The following blurbs come from Koji Kondo and Eiji Aonuma, concerning voice acting in the Legend of Zelda series.

Kondo: The most important thing about the Zelda series is that the player becomes Link. One of the challenges with full voice is that if we’re trying to convey the player’s emotion through Link, but you hear Link talking in somebody else’s voice, that creates a disconnect between you and the role that you’re taking on.

Aonuma: ...if you create a game where everybody else in the game speaks but Link doesn’t, it emphasizes the fact that he is silent and draws even more attention to it. Of course, this was the first time we went with fully orchestrated songs in the game, and we’ve seen what that can do to help bring the world alive and make the game that much more fun. We’re continually looking at ways that we can evolve the series. We’re not confident that we can find the right balance with full voice, so we’ll see. (Jokingly) Everyone would be speaking Hylian, so even if you heard them speak, you wouldn’t understand them."

Aonuma also discussed what he saw in the future of the Zelda series...

I started working on the series not at the beginning but part-way through its history. I think because of that, early on I was more looking objectively at the series and how we could change small, individual elements within it, rather than looking at how the series should evolve. As time has passed – particularly in the last few years – I’ve started to think a lot more about how I can take the series and really make it my own Zelda and evolve it further. As Mr. Miyamoto has allowed me to take the reins on the Zelda series, ultimately that’s what I need to do. Perhaps some people will think it’s a little bit late for me to start thinking about that, but as time goes by, that’s becoming more of a theme in how I’m approaching the series.

link

Famitu's postmortem interview with Aonuma/Fujibayashi concerning The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Aonuma: "It's funny, but Fi, the sword-spirit who appears in this game, was something we finished up before we decided this would be a Zelda that used Wii MotionPlus. We already had her as a sword spirit beforehand, and during our announcement at the 2009 E3 show, her design was modeled after the Master Sword. At the time, though, you used her in a completely different way gamewise than you do now. The MotionPlus swordplay was something that was completed later on, and as a result the game's story and action gameplay came to both focus more on the Master Sword. It wound up coming together pretty well."

Fujibayashi: "From our previous experience, we knew that Zelda needed some kind of character that was there to explain the situation to you. Link, the hero, doesn't speak, so you need someone else talking to you if you want to give hints to the player. That sort of character also serves to expand on the game's world -- you have someone who handles navigation for the player and also holds a lot of responsibility for telling the story. Fi is the character who serves all those purposes in this game.

Something that always gives me trouble when I'm working on Zelda is the fact that, although the point of his adventure is always to save Princess Zelda, that seems more and more contrived the further away Zelda is from Link in terms of relationship. It's like you see this girl for just a moment and you're supposed to want to rescue her because she's probably a princess or something. One of the themes here was to figure out how to really make the player think 'I want to save her!' instead of just making him do so as part of the story progression. The game's story would start to drag if we spent a long time framing this at the start, though, so having them be childhood friends is what we thought was the quickest and easiest way to establish their relationship and portray them in this new world.

In previous games, once you were separated from Zelda, you really didn't see her again until the very end of the game. That makes it harder to keep the player motivated through the whole adventure. We've tried to make it easier to care for Zelda in this game, but that won't be enough to keep the player going to the end, so you also have several near-misses with Zelda throughout the game. We tried to have it so you miss Zelda only by the slimmest of margins -- you have enemies like Ghirahim saying things like 'Zelda's right on the other side of this door.'

There are two reasons for this (Link returning to Skyloft). First, Aonuma requested that the system you use to choose the field you're adventuring in be simple, streamlined, and compact. Second, I liked skydiving so I wanted to do something like that."

Aonuma: "Having the sky be your base allows for easy access to all of the worlds. We hadn't thought about loftbird-based transport at the start -- instead, it was more a case of if you fall off Skyloft here you'll go to the forest, or if you fall off there you'll wind up by the volcano. We realized, though, that that wasn't very realistic -- being able to access all these vast, different worlds from a single small island in the sky -- so that's where the loftbirds came from."

Fujibayashi: "This wasn't how it was organized during the concept phase (returning to three main locations). During development, when we looked at the balance between the size of the world and what we wanted to do, the world was too big and a little too thinly spread out. We decided instead to limit the game to three regions and make each one a lot more dense. I can't talk about exactly what sections we were thinking about [that got cut], but much of it wound up getting used in the game regardless in the end.

This game has the Wii MotionPlus sword action, but the most fundamental part of Link's skill set is his search-and-discover skills, the A-button dashing and climbing and so forth. We wanted it to be fun to find hidden areas and such using Link's own physical skills instead of relying on items, and we were also thinking about how to add a sort of hide-and-seek aspect to the game."

Aonuma: "Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks both had the Phantoms, which you couldn't fight so you had to run from. We thought it'd be fun, once you were used to fighting with your sword, to have a situation where you're thrown into a new world defenseless and have to figure out what to do from there. We wanted it so you needed a real strategy in order to survive. We were thinking about doing Siren in the form of a dungeon at first, but this type of gameplay works best when you're already intimately familiar with the field it's taking place in, so we revised that approach pretty quickly. As a result, the Siren world came together at a pretty early point in development.

It's not really the sort of thing where we can say 'This is how we do it,' (concerning dungeons and puzzles). This isn't the case with every Zelda, but for this game, we thought about the function and ability of each of the items, then came up with fun ways to put them to use.

That's something that always gives me a lot of stress as a producer. For example, once you decide how an item works, then you place stuff around the map that makes use of that ability. If you stop there, though, a lot of players won't pick up on it at all, so you need to make all these fine-tuning adjustments to the maps themselves in order to help people realize how to solve the puzzle. You don't have to take that step, but if you don't, I don't think you'd have those uniquely Zelda-like moments, where an idea suddenly comes to you, you try it out, and remarkably it works. It takes a lot of time to get this sort of balance right, to figure out exactly how much to reveal to the player first. The main keyword with Zelda's puzzles is how to provide the best experience to the player.

With this Zelda, we went back to the fundamentals. We thought about what sort of gameplay we really wanted to make. There were all these new features we wanted to implement, of course, but instead of shoehorning all of them in, we were looking for that solid core we needed in order to evolve the gameplay of Zelda. I think developing this game has helped us get a little better picture of what's really important for a Zelda title. Doing that inevitably takes a lot of time, though -- I really want to take less time for the next project, definitely."

Link

Famitu's postmortem interview with Aonuma/Fujibayashi concerning The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Aonuma: "It's funny, but Fi, the sword-spirit who appears in this game, was something we finished up before we decided this would be a Zelda that used Wii MotionPlus. We already had her as a sword spirit beforehand, and during our announcement at the 2009 E3 show, her design was modeled after the Master Sword. At the time, though, you used her in a completely different way gamewise than you do now. The MotionPlus swordplay was something that was completed later on, and as a result the game's story and action gameplay came to both focus more on the Master Sword. It wound up coming together pretty well."

Fujibayashi: "From our previous experience, we knew that Zelda needed some kind of character that was there to explain the situation to you. Link, the hero, doesn't speak, so you need someone else talking to you if you want to give hints to the player. That sort of character also serves to expand on the game's world -- you have someone who handles navigation for the player and also holds a lot of responsibility for telling the story. Fi is the character who serves all those purposes in this game.

Something that always gives me trouble when I'm working on Zelda is the fact that, although the point of his adventure is always to save Princess Zelda, that seems more and more contrived the further away Zelda is from Link in terms of relationship. It's like you see this girl for just a moment and you're supposed to want to rescue her because she's probably a princess or something. One of the themes here was to figure out how to really make the player think 'I want to save her!' instead of just making him do so as part of the story progression. The game's story would start to drag if we spent a long time framing this at the start, though, so having them be childhood friends is what we thought was the quickest and easiest way to establish their relationship and portray them in this new world.

In previous games, once you were separated from Zelda, you really didn't see her again until the very end of the game. That makes it harder to keep the player motivated through the whole adventure. We've tried to make it easier to care for Zelda in this game, but that won't be enough to keep the player going to the end, so you also have several near-misses with Zelda throughout the game. We tried to have it so you miss Zelda only by the slimmest of margins -- you have enemies like Ghirahim saying things like 'Zelda's right on the other side of this door.'

There are two reasons for this (Link returning to Skyloft). First, Aonuma requested that the system you use to choose the field you're adventuring in be simple, streamlined, and compact. Second, I liked skydiving so I wanted to do something like that."

Aonuma: "Having the sky be your base allows for easy access to all of the worlds. We hadn't thought about loftbird-based transport at the start -- instead, it was more a case of if you fall off Skyloft here you'll go to the forest, or if you fall off there you'll wind up by the volcano. We realized, though, that that wasn't very realistic -- being able to access all these vast, different worlds from a single small island in the sky -- so that's where the loftbirds came from."

Fujibayashi: "This wasn't how it was organized during the concept phase (returning to three main locations). During development, when we looked at the balance between the size of the world and what we wanted to do, the world was too big and a little too thinly spread out. We decided instead to limit the game to three regions and make each one a lot more dense. I can't talk about exactly what sections we were thinking about [that got cut], but much of it wound up getting used in the game regardless in the end.

This game has the Wii MotionPlus sword action, but the most fundamental part of Link's skill set is his search-and-discover skills, the A-button dashing and climbing and so forth. We wanted it to be fun to find hidden areas and such using Link's own physical skills instead of relying on items, and we were also thinking about how to add a sort of hide-and-seek aspect to the game."

Aonuma: "Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks both had the Phantoms, which you couldn't fight so you had to run from. We thought it'd be fun, once you were used to fighting with your sword, to have a situation where you're thrown into a new world defenseless and have to figure out what to do from there. We wanted it so you needed a real strategy in order to survive. We were thinking about doing Siren in the form of a dungeon at first, but this type of gameplay works best when you're already intimately familiar with the field it's taking place in, so we revised that approach pretty quickly. As a result, the Siren world came together at a pretty early point in development.

It's not really the sort of thing where we can say 'This is how we do it,' (concerning dungeons and puzzles). This isn't the case with every Zelda, but for this game, we thought about the function and ability of each of the items, then came up with fun ways to put them to use.

That's something that always gives me a lot of stress as a producer. For example, once you decide how an item works, then you place stuff around the map that makes use of that ability. If you stop there, though, a lot of players won't pick up on it at all, so you need to make all these fine-tuning adjustments to the maps themselves in order to help people realize how to solve the puzzle. You don't have to take that step, but if you don't, I don't think you'd have those uniquely Zelda-like moments, where an idea suddenly comes to you, you try it out, and remarkably it works. It takes a lot of time to get this sort of balance right, to figure out exactly how much to reveal to the player first. The main keyword with Zelda's puzzles is how to provide the best experience to the player.

With this Zelda, we went back to the fundamentals. We thought about what sort of gameplay we really wanted to make. There were all these new features we wanted to implement, of course, but instead of shoehorning all of them in, we were looking for that solid core we needed in order to evolve the gameplay of Zelda. I think developing this game has helped us get a little better picture of what's really important for a Zelda title. Doing that inevitably takes a lot of time, though -- I really want to take less time for the next project, definitely."

Link

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Iwata Asks Vol. 7: Female Staff

- Hisada originally came onto the Twilight Princess team without having played a Legend of Zelda game, so she started with Ocarina of Time.
- She didn't have the courage to finish the Deku Tree stage, so she talked to the staff to learn more of the Zelda logic and approach
- this lead to better understanding what Zelda is all about
- the dev team also finds it fun to startle players by putting certain enemies in locations
- Hosaka and Marunami both started the Zelda series with Wind Waker
- the ideas of many staffers build up into the personalities of characters
- Hirono tried to make Skyward Sword's characters feel familiar and cute even if they looked weird
- character details aren't determined at the start, and requests are usually along the lines of, "Make him sort of such-and-such."
- the setting of Skyloft lead to character/location ideas like "Flowing cloaks would be cool," and "The climate must be cool."
- Hirono details the character creation process a bit more:

Yeah! (laughs) In thinking about the characters, I prepare a wide variety of illustrations, and sometimes others come up with ideas based on those, and we narrow them down for a few models, for which the planners and scriptwriters come up with distinctive dialogue, and the sound staff add in actual voices, so in the end ideas and material from all kinds of people get tightly packed into a single character.

- the only direction originally given for Ghirahim was, "He is an opponent for sword battle, and a Demon Lord who has some sort of objective, and his personality was a little affected and vain."
- the reason Ghirahim has so many diamonds attached to his design is because the dev team used "shape to serve as a symbol of a character", giving him a stronger impression
- Ghirahim's tongue has form and joint structure
- Hosaka explains the dungeon design process she uses:

First, I write up as many kind of gameplay as I can think of using items that you get in the dungeon. Then, rearranging them like puzzle pieces, I thought up a flow of gameplay, like once you've mastered these basics, then you can use it over here.

- Mogmas will cheer you on when you do well in certain situations
- there is one portion of the game where all your items are taken away, and you have to use a different approach to get past enemies and recollect your items
- items from Skyloft were designed with a simple approach, matching the people of the town
- items of the Goddess were made with the approach of "mysterious metal or mysterious material that is oddly smooth."
- the dev team even factors in what the people of Skyloft would build their homes with, figuring that trees would be quite scarce, and therefor too valuable to chop down and make homes out of
- the visual approach to the game was made to give "something that doesn't look scary at first glance is easier to take in your hands"
- characters and enemies were originally in the watercolor design we see now, but they blended in too much with the background
- the team then switched to what they call 'half-toon rendering' for the characters and enemies
- this still lead to the team adjusting colors on each item to make sure everything fit right
- bombs were originally a darker blue, but they would just fade into the background with that coloring
- Rupees were made bigger this time to make them more irresistable
- heart flowers came about because the dev team said, why not heart flowers if there are bomb flowers?
- the original design approach for the Stamina Fruit was, "a plant growing various places. It looks like it would give you strength and like it would taste crisp and refreshing."

Link

Aonuma - Zelda doesn't fit into any genre perfectly, should never resemble other games

“Zelda doesn’t fit into any gaming genre perfectly. Of course there are certain techniques and certain basics that are similar throughout the series, but really what we are striving to do with each new Zelda is offer a new world for people to enjoy and to experience. Over 25 years, while we’ve been working on the Zelda series and creating the games, we’ve always had a wealth of ideas, which I think is what has kept us going all these years. ...On the other hand I do believe that all the Zelda games since have offered new aspects. A Zelda game should never be similar to anything else or resemble other games. This is always what we aim for, and that striving for uniqueness is the common denominator across the series.” - Eiji Aonuma

Link

 

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - another Japanese commercial

Direct link here

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Iwata Asks: Part 6 - The Dense Script and Direction

- Fujibayashi thought of a script that would roughly fit the framework of the game
- He then proposed the script to Aonuma
- Staff decided to tell the story of the Master Sword’s origin early on
- Talk began about how Skyward Sword would be the first story in the series
- Team wondered about involving the birth of Hyrule
- Floating island in the sky also raised questions about how it got there
- Started to knit together different elements, but this created contradictions
- Roughly two years ago, the staff were required to consider a number of elements at once, including the system, stages, and game fields
- Mori, Yoshida, and the cinematic scene staff were joining the team, so they needed to make the hakogaki soon
- Hakogaki: rough synopsis of the essential points of the script
- Because there was little time remaining, Fujibayashi siad he didn’t feel well, stayed home, and wrote for a full day
- Fujibayashi locked himself away, did nothing but write the synopsis from morning to evening
- Aonuma said the synopsis was fine after he read it
- Fujibayashi expected Aonuma to have a number of criticisms, but he actually seemed very understanding
- Aonuma acted this way because the key elements were there
- Aonuma wanted Fujibayashi to make The Legend of Zelda in line with what he thought it should be like; just didn’t want contradictions
- Mori was in charge of writing the dialogue based on the synopsis
- Mori often heard “That hasn’t been decided clearly yet”, which made his job tough
- Mori began creating the scenes even though he had to think about the fact that what he made could be wasted later on
- After Mori made the script, Yoshida and other staff drew storyboards and the motion designers made animation for the storyboards with 3D models


- This isn’t entirely smooth since everyone has their own opinion
- Sound added in after the visuals were finished
- Some things had to be redone since the sound needed to match up perfectly and the timing changed
- 79 cinematics made
- Over 120 minutes for cinematics
- Team decided to count the number rather than the amount of time and set the number last time in Twilight Princess as the standard
- Cinematics were organized (ex: three files for number 30 – 30-1, 30-2, 30-3)
- Fujibayashi was intent on including the scene at the beginning of the game in which Zelda jumps down from Skyloft toward Link as he is flying on Loftwing, and Link panics and tries to catch her
- Fujibayashi hoped to portray all of Zelda’s personality in that scene
- Fujibayashi describes Zelda as bright, lively, emotional, and impulsive
- Aonuma felt that the scene was too long
- Aonuma disliked how cinematic scenes were running one after the other, and players would just want to play the game
- Aonuma got hung up on how it was like a love-dovey romance scene and wondered, “Are we really going to go this direction in The Legend of Zelda?”
- Fujibayashi: For that lovey-dovey scene, it was someone else wanted to put it in. So I said, “We’ll think about it,” and we disbanded and shaved away other parts.
- Aonuma and Fujibayashi are happy that the scene was included in the end
- The scene connects to the dormitory material
- Aonuma believed it was important to make the player feel like they really want to help Zelda
- Mori and his subteam paid special attention to making the players want to save Zelda when writing the dialogue
- Important for Zelda to care for Link from the start more than ever before since they’re childhood friends
- There are a number of near misses throughout the game, player should feel even more strongly that you want to help her
- The team thought about where Zelda is and what she’s doing while Link is adventuring, even if you can’t see her
- Zelda isn’t a princess from start to finish, which is a first in the series
- Zelda is a normal girl, becomes a messenger of the Goddess partway through
- You find out how Zelda becomes a legend in the end
- Zelda is heavily featured even though she’s not a princess
- Mori couldn’t settle on an expression for Zelda in the final scene in Ocarina of Time
- He asked about adding another expression for eyes, but they said it was impossible due to hardware constraints
- Mori was frustrated to the very end and has wanted Zelda to have more vivid facial expressions ever since
- Fujibayashi purposely left some places blank while writing the synopsis so Mori could fill them in
- Zelda is slightly mischievous
- Zelda pushes Link off Skyloft to emphasize that personality (early scene in the game)
- Also done to show how they were up in the sky
- She did it three times because you can only repeat the same gag three times
- Mori put in Link’s reaction for this scene, but but when Miyamoto saw that he said, “Why is Link so surprised?” and “This is normal on Skyloft, right?”
- Mori thought, “Yes, I guess he’s right.”
- It’d be strange to stay calm when pushed off Skyloft, even if it’s happened before
- Mori thought about how he should make it look; Miyamoto thought of a reason for why Link would be surprised when pushed off
- The team fixed up the beginning numerous times
- The number of times Zelda pushes Link off of Skyloft was cut to two
- Miyamoto views the game from the perspective of a first-time player
- This was the first time EAD in Kyoto used an orchestra
- Twilight Princess had some orchestral music, though it was done by the Tokyo Software Development Department like Mario Galaxy
- Tokyo Software Development Department was put in charge of some music for cinematic scenes
- They also made arrangements relating to recording the orchestra
- Staff doubled due to the cinematic scenes
- Without the music in the cinematic scenes, they could have gone on with a smaller staff
- It was tough making music for all 120 minutes of cinematics
- Cinematics rapidly came together towards the end
- Aonuma wasn’t thinking about using an orchestra, but after someone wasked at a roundtable at E3 2010 if the music would have orchestrated music, Miyamoto said that they’d think about it since an orchestra suits the series
- When Aonuma returned to Japan, Wakai asked if the music would be orchestrated; Aonuma said he didn’t think so
- With Twilight Princess, they recorded one track with an orchestra and it was a lot of work
- Aonuma wasn’t sure they could do it for the whole game due to schedule constraints
- Miyamoto essentially demanded that they use an orchestra
- Aonuma: That’s right. That all connected to the orchestra this time. We had him be present for the actual recording, and he was saying in a heartfelt way, “I knew an orchestra was right for The Legend of Zelda!”
- This led to the Symphony Concert
- Aonuma was excited with the concert; he heard many people cry as they listened to music from the series
- Aonuma: I was listening from the side of the stage, but it touched a special place in my heart such as I’d never felt before. Just listening to the orchestra, it gradually came over me. Then all that I had experienced in the game welled up within me.
- Tears were brought to Kondo’s eyes and he apparently teared up during rehearsal
- Staff was in a tired spell in February; listening to a preview of the orchestral music boosted their motivation
- Characters sing, and they also sing during cinematic scenes
- All of the characters have their own thematic sound
- Sound changed along with the background music
- Fujibayashi’s first description of Ghirahim was that he is a narcissist with a personality like a snake
- Fujibayashi was surprised by the images the team made; he would slither out his tongue
- Team made him creepy right down to the details
- There are sometimes three options for the messages you can choose from when talking to characters
- The team paid attention to make the game playable even for five/nine-year-olds

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The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Swedish Street Date Broken

If anyone doesn't wanna wait until the 20th, feel free to point your sword skyward and head over to Sweden.

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Reggie shows off Skyward Sword on Jimmy Fallon

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The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - another round of Japanese commercials

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Aonuma/Kondo talk Skyward Sword's music and instruments, ignoring players expectations

A portion of an IGN interview with Koji Kondo and Eiji Aonuma...

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: 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: 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.

Full interview here

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Iwata Asks Vol. 5: The Dense Sky and Town

- ten people were involved with the sound development
- 5 on sound effects and system, 5 composing
- the first year and a half was spent on instrumentation and a general sound base
- the last sound effects person was added to the team this year
- no other game from Nintendo has ever had 10 sound devs
- 22 devs worked on landforms
- this was the most for a Zelda game ever, as well as a Nintendo game
- the sky travel was designed as a way for players to travel from dense location to dense location
- the team was inspired by Super Mario games and their stage select screens
- this lead to the creation of Skyloft as a base, and the idea of Link jumping down to the areas below
- Fujibayash saw skydiving on TV, which lead to thinking of implementation for a Zelda game
- originally the travel involved jumping from a huge tower
- you would climb up and jump off, repeat
- the higher you climb, the farther you could fly
- the dev team considered adding a bird that would automatically take you to your destination
- when Aonuma saw the early game from the beginning, he thought it wasn't good at all
- Aonuma pushed Iwamoto to focus on the beginning and make sure things made an impact for the player
- Miyamoto saw the early beginning and asked just what the dev team had been doing all this time!
- Miyamoto says the beginning has to be good or you lose players right away
- Aonuma feels development was harder than ever with this title
- the dev team had a new tool they could use to handle things like character dialog and timing on their own instead of using various people
- Miyamoto told Aonuma he originally put in too much text
- Skyloft was made as a place to prepare for your adventure and to explore at a more laid-back pace
- the bazaar houses many shopping/game mechanics in order to make the process quick and easy
- early on, the designers drew up concept images for the sky and proposed multiple ideas with it
- Batreaux is an example of an idea that cropped up early on that made it into the final game
- great attention was paid to creating wind sounds, with 5 designers splitting up to work on different wind effects
- you can play the harp as you walk and play along with background music
- Mario Club Co. Ltd recorded all the event scenes to check sounds
- once a week, the devs held leader meetings to keep things straight
- changing the placements of enemies even slightly could alter the landforms in a big way
- the team could stay focused on such a huge project due to there being just 4 worlds, although all of them very dense



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Aonuma discusses what Legend of Zelda learned from Mario, Kondo discusses composing difficulties

"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. 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."

Koji Kondo also discussed the trials of creating music for games, specifically Zelda...

"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. 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."

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Aonuma talks about the lack of a certain character in Skyward Sword, series' traditions

 I'm going to put this after the jump, as I know how seriously many of you take any and all spoilers. I can't say I blame you one bit, but feel free to hit up the jump if you feel like being spoiled!

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - more footage

Direct link and more here

Aonuma - Unused Skyward Sword items may hit Zelda Wii U, Zelda Wii U is just a 'starting point', 3DS talk

A portion of a Guardian interview with Eiji Aonuma...

TG: There are some interesting new items in Skyward Sword, such as the Digging Mitts and the Beetle. How do you deal with the challenges of adding these new items with their new capabilities? And are there any ideas for equipment didn't make it into the game?

EA: Every time we introduce new items and capabilities into the game, they're very important. They allow you, as a player, to grow within the game and have new abilities. We had many ideas for new abilities in Skyward Sword. Some of them didn't work and so we abandoned them. Some of them, though, we're keeping. Even though we couldn't make them work in this game, we felt they're still good ideas. Maybe we can make them work on the Wii-U. It's possible you might see them in another game we make in this series.

TG: Speaking of the Wii-U, can you tell us about any of the plans you have for that platform? We were all blown away by the Zelda demo you showed on the Wii-U at E3. What can you tell us about that project?

EA: We're definitely excited about the Wii-U and its capabilities as a platform (laughs). Of course I can't really tell you any details about that at this point. However, I should say the demo you saw at E3 is more of a starting point at this time, especially from a graphical standpoint. You should expect many changes, because as I mentioned earlier, our starting point is the gameplay and how we can make it work. It's possible the game will look very different by the time it comes out.

TG: Can you tell us anything about your future plans for Zelda on the 3DS? We all loved Ocarina Of Time, but do you have any plans for any new titles for the Nintendo handheld?

EA: (Laughs) I really can't talk about that! We are working on something, though. There was the Ocarina of time, which was an adaptation of that title to the new platform. The new 3DS game will be a continuation of our efforts on that platform. (Laughs) I'm sorry, I can't say any more.

Full interview here

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - Full Story Detailed MAJOR SPOILERS

I'm sure most of you by now have heard that the Skyward Sword demo leaked to the internet, well here's another leak for Nintendo's faucet. The complete story details (Including end-game) has leaked. This post is so spoiler filled I'm not even gonna put it up on the site. I'll just link you (See what I did there?) to the site where most of this has originated from. If you want to be spoiled, click here.

More spoiler goodness here as well.

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