Aonuma on Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Majora’s Mask comparisons

The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma has weighed in on comparisons fans have drawn between Tears of the Kingdom and Majora’s Mask. This comes as part of an interview with Polygon.

Both titles are built based on their predecessors, but Aonuma was quick to point out that with Tears of the Kingdom, it was “the opposite sort of challenge”. He brought up how with the new Switch title, Nintendo “took the same world and some of the same materials, or constituent parts, but needed to make it [all] bigger, and needed to create a more expansive world”. That goes for both a horizontal and vertical sense.

Aonuma explained:

“With Majora’s Mask — this is something I didn’t really talk a lot about at the time. But that game is kind of the [answer to] the question of: What would you do if you had to make a Zelda game in a year? Ocarina of Time took five years, and we were able to use the ingredients and assets from that to make Majora’s Mask.

In some ways, this was kind of an unreasonable challenge for us to even try to take on. But we decided to take the approach of creating a more compact world, which was somewhat self-contained. And there’s this system of the three-day cycle that would recur over and over again. And as the player went through that game, they would solve the overarching puzzle that kind of was the game. This was definitely a struggle and a challenge to accomplish in one year.

And you know, in thinking about Majora’s Mask in comparison to Ocarina of Time in that way, the change from Breath of the Wild to Tears of the Kingdom kind of goes in reverse. [It was] the opposite sort of challenge, in which we took the same world and some of the same materials, or constituent parts, but needed to make it [all] bigger, and needed to create a more expansive world. Not just in the horizontal sense, but vertically as well.

I think it’s interesting what fans are picking up on. Tears of the Kingdom has a somewhat dark atmosphere, and Ganondorf, this prominent antagonist, brings a certain darkness to it as well. But I think, because of the reasons I mentioned, that these were two very different challenges, and that they don’t have that direct relationship.”

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is now available on Switch.