Email: This interview with Miyamoto is horrifying

http://popwatch.ew.com/2012/06/07/e3-nintendo-shigeru-miyamoto/ 

 

“We’re making experiments on ways to make a Zelda that a lot of people would play.”

 

Umm…. you used to make them… try that way.

 

Him talking about HD visuals makes it seem like the line of Nintendo on HD for years was just lying. He’s like ‘I wanted to make it on a HD console so you could see the movements of the individual Pikmin on the large map. You couldn’t see them before, and that was very troubling for me.’ Oh? So it’s not just a gimmick to sell TVs? 

 

Anyway, this guy makes me mad.

No, everything he said in the interview was pretty good. Well, the Wii Music 2 was horrifying.

Experiments with Zelda is a good thing. This means they are looking to change the formula. Miyamoto also said that the motion controlled Zelda with Skyward Sword didn’t exactly have the results Nintendo wanted. Listen to what he said:

But really what we continue to ask ourselves as we have over the years is, “What is the most important element of Zelda if we were to try to make a Zelda game that a lot of people can play?” So we have a number of different experiments going on, and [when] we decide that we’ve found the right one of those to really help bring Zelda to a very big audience, then we’ll be happy to announce it.

This tells me Nintendo is not happy with Zelda’s sales and wants to increase it by implementing a radical change. The next Zelda will not be an Aonuma Formula game.

My suggestion is how Legend of Zelda was described by the Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter. The essence of Zelda is a hybrid game of arcade elements and computer RPG elements. Zelda is a game as epic as a computer RPG but with the tension and excitement of an arcade game. Stuff like ‘puzzles’ weren’t even mentioned in the same sentence with Zelda until a decade after Zelda came out.

One observation is that in games there are things you consciously realize and things you do not consciously realize. A good analyst is able to tell us unconscious things. For example, in Super Mario Brothers people keep thinking the game is fun because of the power-ups or Mario. But unconsciously, it is the mechanics like how Mario jumps and how he falls. With Zelda, the puzzle solving comes up because people are conscious of it. (Why? Because puzzles stop progress like a brick wall.) The unconscious appeal of Zelda is whacking many monsters with a sword. It is just fun to slice and dice monsters. For some reason, Zelda has gotten away from this. There are less and less monsters to kill. And the monsters you do kill, you have to ‘think’ about them. And that’s no fun.

My suggestion with Zelda is to focus on the unconscious points of satisfaction that no one thinks about. You will know you found it because if you change it, the entire game changes. You can remove puzzles or stories from Zelda with no problem, but if you remove Link killing monsters with a sword it is like removing the jump from Mario.