Aonuma doesn’t want Zelda to look cool on the Wii U

Above: This looks so cool, I would even buy it.

These were Aonuma’s comments a year ago:

The following comments come from Eiji Aonuma…

“You probably remember that when we introduced the GameCube, we showed a somewhat realistic Zelda demo. And what we actually created was the cel-shaded Wind Waker. So when we show a graphic demo, people think, ‘Oh, this is what the next Zelda will look like,’ but that’s not necessarily the case.”

The Zelda team didn’t make the Wii U demo, but Satoru Takizawa, art director of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, headed up its production.

“I’m on one of the committees that oversaw the general steering and direction (of Wii U). We talked to each other a lot about several elements, one of which was, ‘How exactly will the HD graphics work?’ In doing concepts for that … we used Zelda assets quite often to examine, OK, how real will we make this look?”

On Zelda for Wii U including the ideas that were shown in the E3 demo…

“I’d like to do things that are more surprising than that.”

I love that Nintendo developers label ‘surprising’ only to stuff they want to do (the stuff they don’t want to do is somehow always ‘not surprising’). Aonuma’s Skyward Sword’s overworld being a ‘giant puzzle’ was ‘surprising’ (what Aonuma wanted to do). Sakamoto probably pitched his Other M with tons of ‘story’ to be “surprising” as well.

What would be surprising is Nintendo developers doing something they don’t want to do. A Zelda game that matched the tech trailer would be very surprising. Aonuma’s comments are setting everyone up for Zelda Wii U, the very first HD Zelda, to be more like the cloth graphics of Zelda in Nintendo Land.

I like Sakamoto more than Aonuma. Sakamoto worked on the classic Metroid games and is a fan of them. Aonuma never worked on Classic Zelda and has publicly expressed how much he despises the games and wishes to change Zelda.

No one complained about the art style of the Wii U Zelda tech demo. No one… except Aonuma. No one complained about the art style of the Gamecube tech demo either. And I’m not sure what the Japanese reaction was to the Twilight Princess art style, but no one had a problem with it in the West (as sales show). The only problem might be that it wasn’t ‘HD’ which wasn’t the game’s fault. But they put out Wind Waker, where everyone has complaints and sales go down, and they keep trying to force in a Japanese aesthetic on Western consumers with recent Zelda games.

What is going to cause heart break to the Nintendo fans is when Aonuma steers Zelda toward a wacky Japanese cutesy style resembling more like wooden dolls than anything else. There are all these expectations of a HD Zelda and a freaking tech demo that crystallizes these expectations in the fans’ hearts. What does Aonuma say? “Screw you! I don’t want to do that! I’m going to make it the way how I want! Hahahahaha.”

Zelda fans deserve better.