Aonuma on why Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D took so long, changes, more

IGN’s full interview with Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma has now been published. Aonuma talked all about The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D, including why it took so long, changes made in the game, and more.

View some excerpts from the interview below. You’ll find IGN’s full article here.

On whether all of the teases were intentional, like the hand in the toilet bowl in Skyward Sword and Nintendo’s summer-themed wallpaper with Link in a yukata…

Aonuma: The yukata Link wallpaper was actually something that a person in PR here wanted to put out. It was actually something that thematically fits in well, because people tend to wear yukata at the summer festival in Japan. At the summer festivals, it’s also really common to find people selling masks of various popular characters for kids. So we were actually linking those two together in that particular case, just because it worked thematically, not necessarily because there was a really strong intent to remake Majora’s Mask just yet, at that point. But I was really interested to see the reaction that people had to it, and that certainly helped me in how I was thinking about the matter.

As for the hand that comes out of the toilet in Skyward Sword, that was certainly something that you saw in Majora’s Mask as well, but again, there was no strong intent to link those two together specifically. We mostly viewed that scene as something that would be interesting to happen in the kind of school setting where it did.

On the number of changes in Majora’s Mask 3D…

Aonuma: That’s a really hard thing to put a number on. If we talked about every single thing that was different in any way, I mean, that would be a tremendously large number. But if we limit it to just really big changes, I think that would probably be around 20 to 30 or so.

On why Majora’s Mask 3D took so long…

Aonuma: I think the reason for that is because, at the same time that Majora’s Mask 3DS version was ongoing, I was also working on A Link Between Worlds and other new Zelda projects. It’s very rare that I have the opportunity now to work on one single project at a time. If I had been able to work only on the remake of Majora’s Mask for 3DS, then it probably would’ve taken a lot less time. But if I have to juggle it with multiple other projects, and still take the time that I’d like to on fixing everything that I feel needs to be addressed, then that just means the whole project is going to take longer than the original did.

On why Zora Link/swimming were changed…

Aonuma: It’s funny you bring that up because I don’t even remember that swimming had changed from the original Japanese version to the US version. When we approached it this time, all we were really keeping in mind was that we wanted to make the experience a comfortable one for players. The real difference here is in how people have experienced the last 15 years since the original game came out. A lot of people who were big fans may have been playing that continuously for 15 years, returning to it, but I hadn’t really spent a lot of time playing the game over and over in that 15 year period. I just came back to it and suddenly I had this fresh experience which made me think, wow, I really want to work on how swimming is implemented here. So we thought about it and came up with a solution and threw that into the game. The only thing that stands out to me is that I really should’ve come up with the solution earlier.

On any concern that making things more obvious to the player can sort of diminish the sense of satisfaction when they do figure out some of the harder puzzles…

I think one important distinction here is making something easy to understand is not necessarily the same thing as making it easy. There are all these different sidequests with different NPCs in the game and we didn’t want to put the whole process of what you need to do with a particular NPC into the Bombers’ Notebook, because that would certainly take the satisfaction of figuring it out away. We did, however, want to provide the player with more opportunities to get to that point where they could experiment with what they needed to do, where they could try different things. I feel like in previous iterations, those opportunities were just passing by, and now we have the chance with the revised Bombers’ Notebook to bring players into those moments a bit better. That’s really what I mean by “easy to understand.”

On changes he struggled with deciding on…

Boss fights. We thought about making weak spots on bosses a little easier to see, but we definitely discovered that it’s something you have to be careful with, to avoid destroying the feeling of gameplay from the original. This can be a really difficult problem, to such an extent that I occasionally wondered if it might not be easier to make completely new Zelda games rather than return to them with this kind of an eye. It requires so much forethought and iteration, especially on boss fights, not to introduce discomfort with your changes. That was something we tried to stay very cognizant of.