14 DAY TRIAL // Zelda is probably one of the biggest and one of the best known game franchises. Surely, there are the big, modern ones, like Call of Duty or Halo, but they can't really compare with the longevity and the titles that Zelda has under its belt. Creating something that will last for more than just a few years is something that not a lot of developers have managed to do. Most good games create a little bit of hype before they are launched and last for a few more years while the game concept is still popular. But, as soon as a new fab appears, most of them are forgotten and pushed under the counter.
So, when a game does manage to exist for decades, there are a lot of questions on everybody's mind. Some of the questions concerning Zelda, and most of all the Twilight Princess installment in the series, were answered in Links To The Past, an Edge 211 interview with Eiji Aonuma, the Zelda series director. “For Twilight Princess we used the adult Link and one of the interesting things about that was how we considered the precise proportions of Link and the world, “ Aonuma said. “The scale is because we aimed for a more realistic quality in the size of the environments of Hyrule and what that Link faced.”
“But the question,” he further added, “is whether or not we were able to incorporate any and all of the interesting game ideas that were able to take advantage of that kind of sheer grand scale within the Zelda universe. I am afraid that definitely no, we were not able to do all the things that perhaps with hindsight we had the capabilities to do. With that as the starting point, we are now developing the Wii version of Legend Of Zelda.”
And as far as the Wii version went, Aonuma was greatly disappointed by the differences of the finished product between imagination and how these ideas were depicted. “In the case of Spirit Tracks it was relatively easier, because regardless of the actual proportions between the player character and the other objects, we can simply concentrate upon the many game ideas we want to realise. But in the case of trying to depict a relatively photorealistic three-dimensional world, we have to be very careful to adapt the ideas so that they seem to perfectly fit with that world. I must admit that's actually one of my very greatest regrets as regards the Twilight Princess.”