Edge: Released in Japan in 1991 and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, the SNES title The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past has gone down as one of the most revered games in history. It wasn’t the first Zelda, of course, but it set the quintessential adventure template and put the series on a course it has followed for decades. Thus Nintendo’s classic ARPG is considered holy by many, and you don’t mess with sacred artefacts. Not unless you are Eiji Aonuma, a designer who’s worked on the Zelda series since 1998’s equally renowned Ocarina Of Time and who now heads up the team creating A Link To The Past’s sequel for 3DS. We ask him how you follow up a 22-year-old classic on a platform offering a variety of ways to play, and what prompted Nintendo to revisit its world after all this time.
During The Game Awards 2023, we had a chance to talk to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom developers Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi, who reflected on the classic formula versus the new, Zelda's role in the series, and why they don't put much stock in the timeline.
I don't want them to go back the old formula, I just want them to rethink things like the shrines and how free you are to climb and glide everywhere. The big open world where you can tackle the dungeons in any order is cool, but I'd like some heart pieces to be tied to side quests rather than "Rauru's blessing" shrines, and they've made the game so open ended it's nearly impossible to create a good smart puzzle.
There are excellent puzzles in BotW and TotK. Both adventures have wonderful design.
Haters gonna hate.
I love BOTW and have 120 hours in TOTK and had a good time the whole time. When you have a grasp on what you can do with ultrahand, recall and ascend the games puzzles are extremely easy, and moving forwards I would like them to rethink some of their design philosophy to make the overall experience better. I guess I'm a hater though
You're definitely not a hater. There's a lot of things they need to rethink, like heart pieces and inventory upgrades. The shrines were even worse in ToTK with the inclusion of tutorial shrines being scattered around for the most basic of mechanics. I wouldn't even call half of the "puzzles" puzzles, and they're definitely not all built around the idea of freedom which is why shrines limit the freedom. And the "puzzles" that happen outside of shrines are made to make Links abilities useless.
"Well, I do think we as people have a tendency to want the thing that we don't currently have, and there's a bit of a grass is greener mentality"
I think Eiji Aonuma is on point here, which there is nothing wrong with it at all, it's natural to not want something to disappear, you want to make sure you will be getting it once again, and a lot of other factors!
Bad news for TOTK fans, as it now appears unlikely we'll get DLC if comments by the game's producer are anything to go by.
There was no way to upgrade the master sword and no master mode...yea, definitely all they could've done lol.
Well, I think it's better they move on with the next game anyways.
I mean all they did was release a big dlc as a game, so ofcourse they are out of ideas
Yup a big DLC that happens to score very high on metacritic, bu bu bu but Baldur Gate 3 said Hey 👋
I haven't bought this (although I may soon before holidays), but It is what it is, if it's at least as big as BoTW, then I wouldn't complain. I was happy with the content in that game, I never bought the DLC for BoTW anyway.
It was a crime that they sold totk as a new game when it could have been sold as a 30-40 dollar dlc and is definitely not a 70 dollar full blown game
Everyone on here claiming it's nothing but DLC because it reuses the same map to make a new game out of it, but they will all be rushing to defend spider man 2 when it does the same thing
Amemiya writes: "We interview producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi from the Nintendo development team that created this fascinating world."
This new Zelda title will feature lots of things that are new to the series; right at the start of the game, there’s a big surprise that will shock players?
thank you
'"After being so heavily influenced by A Link To The Past, how do you feel to be making a sequel to it all these years later?
I’m slightly worried to be making a sequel to someone else’s game, that’s for sure. When I was younger, I would never have dreamed of making a sequel to a game by Shigeru Miyamoto. But now that I’m older, I’m like, “Whatever!”'
LOL