Shigeru Miyamoto up-ended the tea table with Hyrule Warriors’ development
It’s largely thanks to Shigeru Miyamoto that Hyrule Warriors turned out the way it did.
Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma, speaking with Nintendo Life, said that the project was originally going to be “closer to a Zelda game than a Dynasty Warriors game”. But Miyamoto “up-ended the tea table” and advised the team to go in the opposite direction.
According to Aonuma:
At first, when Hayashi-san approached me, he wanted to make this title closer to a Zelda game than a Dynasty Warriors game — that extended to having boss battles in the dungeons and [having] certain characters in the game. However, Mr. Miyamoto came along and up-ended the tea table, saying, “No, that should not be the case. What we’re doing here is grafting Zelda onto the Dynasty Warriors experience.” It was a reversal of the original proposal from Hayashi-san, which was adding elements of Dynasty Warriors onto the Zelda franchise. It ended up being the other way around based on Miyamoto’s direction.
Yosuke Hayashi also said the following when asked further regarding the challenge of blending the two franchises together:
This relates a bit to when Mr. Miyamoto stepped in to overturn the tea table. It was really trying to strike that balance of making a game that Zelda fans will enjoy that is different from a typical Zelda game, that has enough elements that people will enjoy but also not losing Zelda fans. We ourselves are Zelda fans as well, so we had to ask ourselves the question of what is it that makes a Zelda game, and how many of those elements do we need to include. Up until the very end, we kept adding different elements to the game until we struck a balance that we were happy with.
