Aonuma on Zelda: BotW – art style, expanding from Skyward Sword, music, logo, more
Game Informer now has its full interview up with Eiji Aonuma about The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. The project’s producer tackled topics like the art style, trying to expand on Skyward Sword, whether the team was inspired by particular open world games, music, logo, dungeons, and more.
Head past the break for Aonuma’s comments. For the full interview, head on over here.
On why now is the time to change up the Zelda formula…
Aonouma: So this came up a little bit in our Q and A session earlier, but someone, a user who played Skyward Sword, said, ‘We want to know what happens in the places you can’t go to.’ And I think for people, especially the Zelda fans, they have a curiosity to find out what happens in those places where you can’t go, where you’re not supposed to go. So we wanted to create a world where you can further that investigation, you can go further and further and continue to search for places where you can’t go.
And to make this happen, we needed to create Zelda in a very different way and so that’s why it took a little bit longer than we had expected, the development took a lot longer than I had expected. Mainly because as we’re developing this game, we realized there’s all these new possibilities coming up. Like, ‘Oh, we can do this’ or ‘Let’s expand on that.’ And so that’s why development just took a lot longer. And of course there’s stuff that we couldn’t include because of time constraints, but I really feel like we were able to shape out the Zelda that we really wanted to, that really lives up to what we had envisioned.
On the anime inspirations for the art style…
There’s actually not any specific animation that we took inspiration from, you know obviously there are artists that work on this game and part of that is what kind of animation they watch as they were growing up since it’s a build up of their past experience. So instead of us trying to build a game that’s like an animation it was more about functionally in that animation is a process where you kind of chip away at the unnecessary stuff and really return to the more simple and basic colors. And in the same way we try to do that in where we had to make some of the features of the game very clear, distinct so that it’s visible and clear to the player. So if we put too much detail, too much complexity to the background and the characters, the character or anything that’s going on will start to blend into the background and be hard to see what’s going on. And that’s why we wanted to make it very, pop out and make it very clear that our intent and the focus is very apparent and clear to the user.
On whether the team looked at what other games are doing in the open world space…
First of all I think that many of the staff members do play many different kinds of games, open-world games like you mentioned, but I don’t think there was one game that we really looked at and said we want to make a game like this. Instead like I mentioned earlier we wanted to really expand on the world of Skyward Sword and we kind of tried to think about what kind of cycle can we create in the game that really encourages continuous exploration so that what came up was things like needing to cook and gather ingredients to eat, needing to procure weapons from enemies because they break, things that like there’s a cycle of expending something and then procuring something, that’s like a main important part of this game and it was kind of drawn more from that than any singular inspiration.
On the music…
Definitely some of the music that you heard in the trailer is all recorded, those are professional performers playing their instruments, it’s a raw recording. And so really what we wanted to do, and throughout the game, we’re using even with the professional piano players, so we really wanted to make sure we capture recordings of those instruments because they kind of act, they’re more efficient and more appropriate in bringing up those emotions and the reactions we want out of people and so we were more intentional in the kind of music and recording that we chose to include in the game. Obviously we still have a few more recordings to include, they’re not all in there.
So, you know, the person in charge of music he says to me the dynamics of this music is really important, I don’t really know what that means but all I can say is that is has a lot effect in bringing out emotion and giving the reaction that we want to the player.
On the logo…
(laughter) So this actually has a slightly different meaning… There’s actually a lot of meaning to the way the sword looks. So when you do see it in the release version I hope you’ll be surprised.
On dungeons…
As I mentioned earlier in the presentation, if you go to the shrines some of the items you get will increase the growth potential for Link in terms of the amount of hearts you get or the increase in the amount of stamina gauge you get. And speaking about the bigger dungeons with bosses they actually serve a completely different purpose than the shrines and so the reason that Link has to go to those dungeons is different than the reason he has to go to the shrines.
On the idea behind letting Link climb…
So having to use some sort of stamina gauge and run and dash that’s a function that was available in Skyward Sword and we really enjoyed how that feels and how that works out but we thought about how can we expand on that idea. In Skyward Sword you’re only able to climb in certain designated areas and we kind of threw that all those limitations and made it so you can climb anywhere. And when you’re able to climb anywhere you’re able to get to high places, and look down and then adding the paraglider, you can really go down and enjoy this experience. Where it started was wanting to expand on the idea from Skyward Sword.
