Spent too much time overhauling and perfecting game design and put the interns on story and narration.
As a lifelong Zelda fan, I’ve never cared much for the stories of Zelda games anyways. Like Mario games, they’re always incredibly simple placeholders that boil down to “princess gone, defeat evil that took her”. These games got their start when that was the only story that you could fit on the cartridge anyways, so I could see why Nintendo would want to keep that spirit alive.
Plus, in an open world game, is story really that important? I’d rather have the excellent gameplay of TOTK than something like Red Dead 2 which is a great story with excruciatingly boring gameplay.
The stories in most Nintendo games are weak and mostly pointless. I loved BOTW but strrrrrrrruggled to enjoy TOTK. It just felt too gimmicky. And I adore RDR2, story and gameplay.
I really enjoyed the writing of the side characters in the N64 games. Sure most only had two maybe three things to say outside a side quest but they all had a nugget of commentary on the human condition.
Personally I thought that N64 and the beginning of GC had the best cadence of Zelda games; a retelling of the main “legend” (evil ganon, triforce power corrupted, magical princess captured to use towards ultimate evil plan, hero appears, master sword, open path to ganon, defeat, time/space/existence saved) which was OOT, followed up by “here’s another adventure the hero went on that has almost nothing to don’t any of that, and it’s more character driven” which was Majoras Mask. It looked like we’d repeat that cycle with WindWaker (and to some extent I guess we did with Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks) but then we got TP and nothing and SS and nothing and they got so bogged down into turning Zelda into a lore dump. Now we don’t even have dungeons and item anymore. Dungeons and items were the core gameplay! Imagine being able to hook shot around in BotW?
The sort of alternate universe I yearned for once upon a time was Zelda continuing to be about time gimmicks. OoT had two points in a timeline, MM had the groundhog’s labor day weekend, and there was oracle of ages/seasons by Capcom. I guess there’s only so many ways to spin it though.
Yeah the main reason I love Zelda games is the exploration and puzzles.
I kinda liked the over the top anime narration. The repeated lines after every dungeon were terrible, but really enjoyed the tears stuff.
Honestly I don’t think anyone can really look at TotK and not think it was a massive undertaking. They took the giant open world of BotW, made it bigger, and added a ton of more physics interactions, and have it running on a 7-year-old gaming tablet. It’s incredible they could do that at all.
Always interesting to read about some of the specific considerations to go into features that may not seem that complicated at first glance (especially to the layman).
After reading that headline, for just a moment, I thought this was going to be Bethesda-style gaslighting of players…
