Aonuma on Majora’s Mask, returning to time manipulation in the future, amiibo, remakes, retirement
GameSpot has gone live with a new Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D-centric interview featuring series producer Eiji Aonuma. Aonuma shared some insight into the game, and touched on several other topics as well including returning to time manipulation in the future, amiibo, remakes, and retirement.
Look below for some excerpts from the interview. The full thing can be found here.
GameSpot: Thematically, the game is very different than previous Zelda games and even compared to the games that came after. What drove the decision to make this more of an adventure-puzzle game, and why do you think the series hasn’t tried this kind of experimental form again?
Eiji Aonuma: I guess one way to address that is, when you’re thinking about time as an element of gameplay, we really did all that we set out to do here. And to a certain extent that’s true with masks as well. Because we so fully realized our ideas with how to use those as themes in the game, we felt like we were done with it and were ready to move on to new ideas afterwards.
We didn’t feel the need to use those exact ideas in other games beyond that. But it’s interesting for me to come back to it now because in this remake, we got the opportunity to revisit those same game ideas, but also to make some interesting improvements and changes elsewhere.
With the way that you progress through this game as opposed to more traditional Zelda games, especially with all the time manipulation, is that something that we might see again sometime in the future?
One particular game element, being able to slow down the passage of time, I think that’s something that we may be able to revisit in the future. But if we were to do so, it would have to to be implemented in a different way. It would have to be different to be meaningful. So that’s something you might see again in the future.
One thing that felt very different from other Zelda games was the section where you’re rescuing Romani ranch and its horses from aliens. When I played this as a kid, I thought that they were sent by the Gorman Brothers. But replaying it now, they were definitely just a weird, alien-like presence. What was the inspiration behind their inclusion?
Really? I’d never heard anything like your Gorman Brothers theory before. I’ll have to remember that!
But the reason we used this at the time was because Japan was experiencing something of a UFO boom. And it even went so far as for shows on TV to cover it and explaining to people what cattle mutilation was. So even to see words as scary as “cattle mutilation” on TV and the idea of UFOs abducting people led to this whole idea of Earth being invaded by aliens becoming rather popular. I thought it would be really interesting and scary to use in a game. That’s how we decided to go with that.
I’m not sure how its release lined up with the development of Majora in Japan, but was Twin Peaks an inspiration at all? I feel like in some ways it had a similar, quirky vibe.
While I certainly did watch Twin Peaks, I feel like I watched it quite a bit before working on Majora’s Mask. One thing that stands out to me is speaking with Mr. [Takashi] Tezuka [director of Link’s Awakening], and he was saying there was a certain storyline in Link’s Awakening that was inspired by something that he’d seen in Twin Peaks.
I feel like maybe when the show aired in Japan, that was quite a bit further back compared to when we were working on Majora’s Mask. But I absolutely do love that really strange world that was drawn in Twin Peaks. And who knows, I might’ve carried something forward with me that wound up influencing the creation of the world in Majora’s Mask as well.
Are there any Western games that influence where you get these ideas or inspiration from?
Certainly, I do play Western games. I think I’ve put some comments out there about being really interested in Skyrim, but then people started connecting it to the idea that I was making an open-world game now. I really didn’t want to make that connection to explicit since it’s really not how it works.
I do play a lot of games from the West; for example, I’ve been playing Far Cry, which also has this large, open world. When I play these games, what stands out to me is that there different kind of themes and the ways that they make the player feel when they experience them. I think that that’s always a really valuable reference for developers. And I think that is something that all developers do. It’s something that they all think about when they’re playing other games.
The release of this game in the West along with the New 3DS is a little bit of a coincidence, since the system’s been out for a while in Japan. But given the New 3DS’s built-in NFC reader, was there any thought given to Amiibo support for the game? It seems like the Skull Kid statue that comes in the special edition would make a perfect figurine.
We really did want to do Amiibo, like with Skull Kid, that would work with Majora’s Mask. But one of the things that was really difficult was, because this was a remake of the game, we didn’t have the opportunity to build the kind of gameplay that would connect to using an Amiibo in this way. Ultimately, and unfortunately, we had to back off of that idea.
But looking forward, I really want to do something like that on a new title. So I hope you’re going to look forward to that.
Assuming Majora is as successful as Ocarina was, is there any chance of seeing more remakes like this in the future?
When I think about the remakes that we’ve been doing, I realize it’s been mostly Zelda titles so far. But there’s a lot of things that come into consideration when you’re looking at doing something like. What can you bring to the gameplay experience to make it more comfortable or to give it a slightly different feel? In particular, there’s some interesting things you can do on a handheld.
You had to consider how you would use a controller in these previous Zelda games, and you have to pay particular attention to how that translates into a handheld so that you’re definitely improving on the experience rather than simply transposing it. We always think about things we wanted to do in the original development of Majora’s Mask, as well as other games, and as time goes on, sometimes new technologies appear that allow you to do those things you couldn’t in the beginning. I love those sorts of opportunities, because I think that’s a really interesting way to recontextualize a game, and, in some cases just improve it outright.
As far as what games might be remade in the future? I think that we always pay a lot of attention to user demand to see what sort of things people are talking about. When I first came to this 3DS Majora’s Mask project, it was something that I personally had really wanted to remake for a while. But at the time that I first started working on it, I didn’t really know if people wanted it. If they’d want to buy and play it. So I was really happy to see as I was coming into the later stages of development of the game, that there were a lot of player voices out there of people who were saying that they wanted this game to come out. And I was really happy to see that.
My final question: you’ve been known as the caretaker of the Zelda franchise for such a long time. Have you wanted to branch out from that at all, or are you content with taking overseeing this franchise?
Honestly, I’m getting to the point in my career where I have to think about what sorts of things I want to do and how much time I have left before retirement. I’ve certainly enjoyed all the time that I’ve spent working on Zelda games, even when it’s a struggle, I’ve absolutely enjoyed it. But I’m probably not too far from retirement. I should start to think about a successor, someone who can take over all of this. That’s a very important decision, but that’s one of the things that is bouncing around in my head on a daily basis as I work.
