Hyrule Warriors – Zelda is Queen Zelda, Aonuma gave the dev team a ton of freedom, soundtrack, more

Yet another Hyrule Warriors interview has gone live, this time coming from MMGN. Producers Yosuke Hayashia and Hisashi Koinuma as well as supervisor Eiji Aonuma spoke about Zelda’s role in the game, the large amount of freedom given to the development team, soundtrack, and more.

Excerpts from the interview are posted below. Head on over to MMGN for the full interview.

On the relationship between Link and Zelda…

Mr. Hayashi: In Hyrule Warriors Princess Zelda is actually Queen Zelda. She has an army, as a Queen would, and Link is a trainee, but as the story unfolds the relationship between the two greatly changes.

On whether Zelda will have a more prominent role in future games in the series…

Mr. Aonuma: With regard to Princess Zelda and her position in each story, we always position her where it’s best suited for that story or theme. We always try to achieve her best position within the story with each game or iteration. Just because she’s one way in one game, it doesn’t mean she’ll be the same way in the next game. We definitely change how Zelda is used and position her where it’s best for the experience. That’s as Queen and one of the playable characters in Hyrule Warriors.

On whether players pick who they’re playing as or do they automatically change as the story unfolds…

Mr. Koinuma: As you progress through the story, the characters unlock. So you’re able to play with different characters as the story progresses and most of the stages have fixed characters, so you play with certain characters depending on the stages – but then there are some stages in which you can choose which character to play as.

On whether there were any major issues in combining Zelda/Hyrule Warriors and if any rules were put in place…

Mr. Hayashi: Our main goal in Hyrule Warriors is to create an action game in which players play as a variety of characters from the Zelda world with gameplay that feels really good. The act of taking down enemies with one fell swoop needs to feel natural like it does in the Zelda series.

As we take these elements from the Zelda universe and implement them in the traditionally Dynasty Warriors environment, we use care with everything that we do. We try to incorporate as many aspects of Zelda that fans will appreciate into this different universe, but with every step along the way we were very careful to make sure it fit the Dynasty Warriors environment.

Mr. Aonuma: When I was speaking with the development team at Tecmo Koei, I actually told them to do things differently. I gave them a lot of freedom and told them that they didn’t have to be so careful with taking Zelda elements and putting them into Hyrule Warriors.

As I was working with them, I found the development team has lots of fans of the Zelda franchise, so they were the ones who put it upon themselves to take such a high level of care with the Zelda elements, not me or Nintendo. I gave them so much freedom that I told them they could almost break the Zelda elements a little if they had to, but they didn’t. They were very, very cautious and very careful.

On whether that freedom led to any unexpected surprises Aonuma never expected to see with Zelda characters…

Mr. Aonuma: Oh yeah! [laughs]

There were times when I saw things that exceeded even my imagination. In the same way the progress on development showed me a lot of surprises, and left me in awe, I think Zelda fans will experience the same feelings of surprise when they get to play Hyrule Warriors.

On the soundtrack…

Mr. Hayashi: The soundtrack was actually a process of trial and error. Ultimately what we landed on was taking music from the Zelda universe and arranging it to suit this new environment. As for the people behind the music, we actually had different people working on different stages to give them different sounds.

Mr. Aonuma: The original music from Zelda fits the Dynasty Warriors environment really, really well but because this is a battlefield, we needed to change it a bit so it suited what was happening on the screen.

On whether Amiibo support is possible…

Mr. Hayashi: Yesterday [the Nintendo E3 Digital Event] was actually the first time I’d seen the Amiibo figurines. I really want to collect them! [laughs]

On the controls…

Mr. Hayashi: The basis is still the traditional Dynasty Warriors controls, but we have included essential Legend of Zelda controls like L-Targeting because we know Zelda players are going to want to target single enemies.

The button layout is for the most part the Dynasty Warriors control scheme, but per Mr. Aonuma’s input, we made sure to include the essential Zelda control inputs.

As for the GamePad, because there are so many items, we made it possible using the touchscreen for players to choose those items, but you can also use the Control Pad to change items as well if you don’t want to take your right hand away from the controls or move your hand off of the GamePad.