Nintendo on why Zelda stories are made after the gameplay

If there’s one thing fans know about Nintendo, it’s that the company focuses on gameplay over story. This even applies to The Legend of Zelda, which does have more of a plot compared to some of the company’s other major series like Super Mario.

On the topic of Zelda, series producer Eiji Aonuma has weighed in on how Nintendo approaches the story for the franchise’s games. The plot only comes about after the game design has been settled upon. That’s something we recently heard about with Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, where the gameplay was nailed down first and the story was more of a late addition.

Here’s what Aonuma shared in an interview with The Washington Post:

“I’ve never really made a game where you think of the story first and then go into gameplay. First when you think of the gameplay, what you’re trying to think of after that is how you can get players to understand that gameplay.

The story becomes used as a vessel because it has a beginning and end and the player moves through it. I think it would actually be kind of difficult to do the reverse and start with the story, then try to match the gameplay mechanics to that.”

One way in which Zelda will be focusing on the story is through the upcoming movie – after all, that’s what drives films. For those that previously missed the movie announcement, we’ve got that news here.