Nintendo “expend a lot of time” on matching up Zelda stories… and is Yoshi male or female?
The Zelda timeline is quite a touchy subject for fans of the series. Nintendo has never provided an official sequence of events, causing a significant amount of discussion and debate among franchise followers. Be rest assured though that the developers of each Zelda title put a lot of effort into the stories so that they can match up. Shigeru Miyamoto discussed that topic and more – including Yoshi’s gender – in the latest Iwata Asks.
Iwata: When you make a Zelda game, how do you think about the story?
Miyamoto: The stories in The Legend of Zelda may not match up as the series progresses. We actually expend a lot of time trying to make them match up, though. It would make things a lot easier if the players said, “Oh, that doesn’t really matter.” (laughs)
Iwata: (laughs) You would rather spend your energy making game elements rather than the story.
Miyamoto: That’s right. Sometimes people ask whether Yoshi is a boy or a girl. If I answer, “Probably a boy,” then they say, “So a boy is laying eggs?” (laughs)
Iwata: (laughs)
Miyamoto: But the moment I say Yoshi lays eggs so Yoshi must be a girl, they’ll say, “Then Yoshi’s voice needs to sound more like a girl’s!” But I want to make video games without having to worry about such background info. Take the animated series Popeye, for example. In old cartoons like those, the roles of the characters were different every time.
Iwata: The setting changed every time.
Miyamoto: Even though the setting was different each time, the characters you knew and loved would come out and perform. Well, the Mario games are set up like that. It would be much easier if we could use any setting in The Legend of Zelda while preserving the essential relationship between Link, Ganon and Zelda.
Iwata: But when a series builds up for as long as it has, that isn’t easy.
Miyamoto: Right. Especially when it comes to a story of the Zelda games, we can’t do anything disappointing, so with the Ocarina of Time, we worked on the story with reference to the past games in the series.
