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Miyamoto wanted to change Navi in Zelda Ocarina of Time: "its biggest weakpoint"
An interview published in 1999 has reappeared translated on the web with previously unknown details of the legendary Nintendo 64 title.
Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of such influential series as Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Star Fox, or The Legend of Zelda, did not like the idea of having Navi as a companion in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998, N64), the iconic title for Nintendo 64. The first three-dimensional game in Link's saga was seminal in terms of understanding many things in the videogame industry. Despite its acknowledged status as a masterpiece, Miyamoto himself acknowledged in a 1999 interview that the character's role was "the biggest weakpoint".
The comments are taken from an interview published in a Japanese strategy guide -translated by Shmuplations- which can now be read online (via Eurogamer). Its newsworthiness is uncontested since these statements had not been made public in the West.
The balance between helping too little and too much
Miyamoto then acknowledged that the repetitive appearances of Navi, who acts as a guide in Ocarina of Time, resulted in a system that was "too unfriendly" because of its constant interruptions; for some, it was even annoying. The Japanese creative was concerned about having an overly intrusive help system.
“If you read Navi's text, she says the same things over and over,” Miyamoto said in the interview. “I know it makes it sound bad, but we purposely left her at a kind of ‘stupid’ level,” he added. He also suggested how he would have liked Navi to appear in the game. “I think if we'd tried to make Navi's hints more sophisticated, that ‘stupidity’ would have actually stood out even more. The truth is I wanted to remove the entire system,” he mentioned about Navi, “ but that would have been even more unfriendly to players.”
This small contradiction also has an explanation. Miyamoto-san admits that he wasn't very skilled at action games, thus the idea of a help and hint system appealed to him, but in a different way.
The rest of the interview delves into the difficulty of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the first in the series with a fully three-dimensional structure. One of Miyamoto's roles in the design of the title was precisely to ensure that the player somehow knew what their goal was, in more or less clear ways.
How to officially play Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 2022?
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is part of the Nintendo 64 game catalog on Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. It is also possible to buy it in physical format for Nintendo 3DS (remake made by Grezzo in 2011) and on Wii U with its original version through the Virtual Console of the eShop.
Source | Shmuplations; vía Eurogamer