Eiji Aonuma had other, lesser plans for Link

Dec 28, 2009 09:45 GMT  ·  By

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks was released in North America, three weeks ago, to be precise, and, while Nintendo is already working on an unnamed 16th addition to the Legend of Zelda franchise, another game in the series could have arrived before it. There was something else on Eiji Aonuma's mind, the Zelda series director, and it wasn't a fully fledged, heavy-weight Zelda title. The thing that seemed to tickle his fancy more was another Wii Zapper gimmick that would make use of the Zelda name.

Speaking to gamesTM magazine, Aonuma said that Link's Crossbow Training 2 could have been his next project. "To tell you the truth, I actually wanted to create Link's Crossbow Training 2," he said. "I thought that we should do something more and better in the field of the first person shooter, based on our experience of the first game. For example, I was thinking that maybe we could intensify the multiplayer mode. The original game was really just a solo game but I thought that we could add a true multiplayer mode with multiple users playing together, from remote areas, over the Wi-Fi Connection."

But, in the end, Crossbow Training 2 never came to life, and the franchise moved on to another proper addition. Since this seemed to be Aonuma's pet project, his special, little baby, some might wander how come the game was never given birth to, if not for anything, at least to know to whom to give thanks to. According to Aonuma, it looks like, this time, the head of the corporation is the one that saved gamers from a traumatic experience.

"The fact of the matter is that a lot of people inside Nintendo insisted that I should work on a new Legend Of Zelda title rather than working on more Crossbow Training," Aonuma added. By the way this was phrased, it looks like people just didn't have the heart to tell him that a Zelda FPS was just a bad idea, and tried to distract his attention with a bigger, shinier Zelda game.