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Nintendo released Goodbye! BoxBoy! in Japan last week. In turn, Famitsu caught up with a few of the game’s developers for a wrap-up interview. Director Yasuhiro Mukae, level designer Yutaka Watanabe, graphic designer Yusuke Ota, and programmer Takaaki Kawahara participated in the discussion.

The initial part of Famitsu’s interview touches on the start of the BoxBoy! series. Originally, the first game came about from a planning document Mukae created as part of a competition within HAL. He ended up as the series director, and determined how the project would be and what content it would have.

Toon Link began to be associated with portable Zelda games since Four Swords. The character was then featured in both Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks on DS, before going on to be included in Tri Force Heroes on 3DS.

Interestingly, Nintendo even considered Toon Link for A Link Between Worlds. Designer Yoshiki Haruhana revealed this nugget in the new Zelda: Art & Artifacts book, stating that there was “a long debate” about which Link should be in the game. Some members of the team carried the opinion that it should be Toon Link since it was a handheld game, while others felt it should be the original from A Link to the Past, which was ultimately selected.

That wasn’t all though. Originally, Link from A Link Between Worlds (and A Link to the Past) was originally going to be used in Tri Force Heroes. This suddenly changed when series producer Eiji Aonuma declared one day that Toon Link would be used instead.

WCCFTech caught up with Rebellion for an interview that was primarily focused on Sniper Elite 4. However, the site also asked a question about Switch. That prompted a representative from Rebellion’s technical department to say that the system “certainly brings some fascinating options to the table”.

Here are the full comments:

“It’s always exciting to see a new console and of course a new Nintendo console. The Switch certainly brings some fascinating options to the table – I know our Co-founder Chris Kingsley said he likes how flexible the controllers are. Currently, we’ve only announced Sniper Elite 4 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, and we’ve got nothing more to announce at the moment.”

Back in the day, Rebellion brought Sniper Elite V2 to Wii U. It’d be interesting to see if the developer would be up to supporting Switch in the future.

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Update (2/9): Embed version is up:


Original (2/8): Game Informer put up its first online feature pertaining to its cover story on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild today. In a four-minute chat, Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma talk a bunch about the anticipated game, as well as other topics such as Link’s full name, what “NX” stood for (they don’t really know), and more.

Unfortunately, we don’t have an embed option at present, so you’ll need to visit this page for the full interview. We’ll add it in here once it’s posted to Game Informer’s YouTube page.

Nicalis has already announced and hinted at a few games for Switch such as The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+. According to the company’s Tyrone Rodriguez, the team is also preparing “way more” titles for Nintendo’s new system.

Rodriguez told Polygon that Nicalis was able to gain access to Switch “a little bit early” having also received dev kits for the likes of Wii U and 3DS. Development has also been incredibly smooth, and it’s been “light years ahead of what we were doing with Wii U.”

As Rodriguez said:

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Famitsu once again has quite a bit of Switch coverage in this week’s issue. Among the games covered is Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, including an interview with producer Kosuke Yabuki (director on the original, also the producer of Arms by the way).

First, Yakubi commented on why Mario Kart 8 is being brought to Switch. He explains that the system can be played as a console, on the go, by sharing controllers, and can be experienced online. As a developer, Yabuki thought it would fit well with Mario Kart, and wanted to offer a Mario Kart to fans as soon as possible. So therefore they started developing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe using Mario Kart 8 as basis.

According to Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata, the developers working on Square Enix’s RPG have interest in Switch. Unfortunately though, there aren’t any plans to port the game over at present.

Tabata is unsure as to whether or not Final Fantasy XV would run on Switch. He says that tests really haven’t been done to see if it would be possible.

Here’s the full exchange between DualShockers and Tabata:

Past Zelda games have allowed players to give Link any sort of name they desired. In Breath of the Wild though, the character’s name is set. During a chat with German YouTuber lookslikeLink, Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma confirmed that you won’t be able to change Link’s name. That’s because he wants players themselves to feel like they’re becoming Link.

Aonuma was also asked if Breath of the Wild ended up the way he imagined it. To that, he said the game turned out just the way he imagined it from the beginning. Aonuma found it difficult to stop working on the project since the team continued to put more content into the world to explore. He hopes that players will have enjoy discovering all the things in the game for themselves.

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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is taking a much different approach to dungeons. Whereas dungeons continued to increase in scope over the past few entries in the series, Nintendo has decided to turn things down a notch this time around.

Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma told Game Informer this month:

“Way back in the day, dungeons weren’t all that big. They were rather small. But around Twilight Princess, they started getting bigger. We tried to cram in a lot of surprises for the player, or a lot of emotions, meeting other characters, or injecting story elements into it. But then we kind of realized, do dungeons really need to be that big? Do we have to cram that much stuff into it? We quickly realized that a lot of the fun was actually in getting to the dungeon, and so we focused on getting to the dungeon in this game. We wanted to create an environment where it is fun to find the dungeon in this large world.”

Game Informer has a big article on Zelda: Breath of the Wild this month. Sprinkled throughout are comments from Eiji Aonuma, producer of the series.

While it may have been expected based on what we’ve seen so far (such as the decayed Temple of Time which pretty much gave it away), Aonuma officially confirms that Breath of the Wild takes place after Ocarina of Time. He also spoke about how Nintendo is approaching the story in general:

“Because we wanted to redefine the whole process, I didn’t want to be chained up by the idea that we had to think about the past titles. But then again, I know there are a lot of fans who are interested, and who are knowledgeable in the Zelda franchise and the history. So by adding little elements here and there, we wanted to give the fans the opportunity to say, ‘Oh, I saw this. Maybe this is how it expands the story,’ or give little hints here and there.”


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