Email: Aonuma wants to put high school drama into Zelda…

Have you seen this interview?

http://www.1up.com/news/eiji-aonuma-wraps-zelda-skyward

– The starting plot unfolds quite a bit differently from other Zeldas. “This game’s plot is something like a school drama, you could say,” Aonuma noted with a laugh. “The flying sequence at the E3 demo is Link competing against his classmates. One of them looks kind of a like a bad guy, as you saw, and he shows up in other ways in the game too, since he has a major thing for Zelda.”

– Despite this, though, the game progresses in a somewhat similar fashion to a previous Zelda title. “The game starts in Skyloft, this city that’s floating in the air, and you’ll come back to this town multiple times,” Aonuma said. “Things are always proceeding along in town, and in that respect it’s very much like Majora’s Mask. Like with Majora, there are a lot of game events involving the townspeople that get intertwined with the main story. Link, Zelda and their other friends all go to the same boarding school, and you’ve got teachers and a principal as well. It’s a bit of a different setting from previous Zeldas.”

I feel like this is a bad parody of Legend of Zelda. I can see some nerdy version of Link being played by Michael Cera as he tries to impress the popular girl Zelda, but he must compete with the local jock for her affection.

Why would anyone think this is a good idea? Who has ever played a Zelda game and thought that what the game was lacking was a love triangle? And if that other guy shows up in different parts of the game then this is something that players will have to choke down for the entirety of the adventure.

Aonuma also makes comparisons to Majora’s Mask to explain how the NPCs will interact with the main story. But the way he describes it makes it sound more like Twilight Princess. In Majora’s Mask there was barely anyone in Clock Town that you had to talk to in order to advance in the game, and they were all at the beginning if I remember correctly. In Twilight Princess you had ‘side stories’ like the farm girl having amnesia, and that got tied into the main game by forcing you to stop adventuring so you could play a boring escort mission. The town NPCs were tied into the main game by forcing you to visit and talk to them before letting you move on. I’m expecting this to be what happens in Skyword Sword.

Shut up, customer. They are engaging in blessed ‘creativity’. It took them five years to come up with this incredible story. They are Game Gods. Worship them immediately.

In all seriousness, I don’t think Nintendo understands what Zelda is. The definition of Zelda is what the market thinks of it, not what Aonuma or Miyamoto thinks of it.

It seems like the approach to making Zelda is to get people at a table to ‘brainstorm a story’. And then ‘brainstorm puzzles and items to do puzzles’. And then combine them. And that’s it.

This doesn’t even sound like a game from professionals.