Ever Oasis director on Nintendo and Square influences, challenges making the game
The soon-to-be-released Ever Oasis was created by Grezzo, the same team behind Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D. It’s also directed and produced by Koichi Ishii who has a long history with Square (Enix)’s Mana series.
In a new interview, Ishii spoke about how working with Nintendo on the Zelda 3DS titles influenced Ever Oasis. At the same time, he feels there are “Square-isms” present from his time as well.
He said:
“We worked together with Nintendo staff while developing the game so I think it’s steeped in “Nintendo-isms” such as the controls, how it looks, how it guides players, its rules, the level designs, and the accessibility of its user interface. Still, you can definitely feel the ‘Square-isms’ in it too.”
Ishii also commented on the challenges of implementing a narrative, gathering, and crafting mechanics in a single game. He explained:
“Even though the design for the game was put together logically, when it came to actually making it, it proved to be a challenge to fuse the running of the oasis with the exploration & adventures. There were parts we found unintuitive when actually playing, as well as parts where the emotion was lost.
Is there a sense of achievement? What is the rhythm and the cycle between the two kinds of gameplay like when actually playing? When these sorts of things weren’t working, the game didn’t feel much fun, but we managed to overcome these obstacles bit by bit. Getting the interesting elements of the game I had envisioned into the final product proved to be a challenge right up until the very end.”
