14 DAY TRIAL // Skyward Sword is the last Zelda game to arrive on the Nintendo Wii and one of the leading developers working on the game says that it’s a template on how future titles can make gamers care more about Link and Zelda.
Speaking to Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu Hidemaro Fujibayashi, who is the director who worked on The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, stated, “Something that always gives me trouble when I’m working on Zelda is the fact that, although the point of his adventure is always to save Princess Zelda, that seems more and more contrived the further away Zelda is from Link in terms of relationship.”
The developer says Zelda development teams always had a problem linked to how they could make the player care about Zelda and transfer their feelings to Link, given the relatively brief time they have together at the start of the games, before she is taken away.
They tried to solve this in Skyward Sword by making it more important to interact with her before significant portions of the story.
Hidemaro Fujibayashi added, “We’ve tried to make it easier to care for Zelda in this game, but that won’t be enough to keep the player going to the end, so you also have several near-misses with Zelda throughout the game. We tried to have it so you miss Zelda only by the slimmest of margins – you have enemies like Ghirahim saying things like ‘Zelda’s right on the other side of this door.”
Nintendo has not officially announced whether they are already working on a Zelda game for the upcoming Wii U home console but it would make sense to have at least one major release ready for launch date, which is supposed to arrive during the summer of 2012.
The company wants Skyward Sword to make the regular Wii a more appealing proposition for customers this Christmas.