Fans of the traditional Zelda adventure experience were slightly disappointed when it was announced that Hyrule Warriors, recently released in Japan, looked like Zelda but played like Hyrule Warriors. Yesterday, it was revealed that originally, the game would be less DW and more Zelda. So what happened?
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In an interview with Nintendo Life, lead Zelda designer Eiji Aounuma and Tecmo Koei designer Yosuke Hayashi sat down and discussed how the successful action title came to be.
Aounuma states that, "At first, when Hayashi-san approached me, he wanted to make this title closer to a Zelda game than a Dynasty Warriors game - that extended to having boss battles in the dungeons and [having] certain characters in the game."
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"However," he continues, "Mr. [Shigeru] Miyamoto (ed note: the legendary game designer) came along and up-ended the tea table, saying, "No, that should not be the case. What we're doing here is grafting Zelda onto the Dynasty Warriors experience." It was a reversal of the original proposal from Hayashi-san, which was adding elements of Dynasty Warriors onto the Zelda franchise. It ended up being the other way around based on Miyamoto's direction."
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But that is not to say that bringing the two franchises together was easy. Zelda is an internationally renowned adventure which finds ways to reinvent itself constantly while still staying true to its original, while Dynasty Warriors never caught on outside of Japan. At times, DW sequels felt like little more than new skins grafted onto old bodies.
Hayashi responded, "It was really trying to strike that balance of making a game that Zelda fans will enjoy that is different from a typical Zelda game, that has enough elements that people will enjoy but also not losing Zelda fans. We ourselves are Zelda fans as well, so we had to ask ourselves the question of what is it that makes a Zelda game, and how many of those elements do we need to include."
"One of the things that I think is required by a Zelda game is, for example, the loading scenes, which we kept - like the first scene where you come upon a treasure box and you have Link, or whoever, lifting the item up from the treasure box. But we realized we needed more than just that, so we ended up adding more and more aspects that were Zelda-esque - for example, the sound effects and animations that people are familiar with from the franchise."
By all accounts, the game has more or less successfully married the two disparate titles. For a little taste of what is to come, you can check out the English language opening cinematic. True to Zelda, there are no voices. It's effective in quickly setting up the stakes. Watch below.
Here in the States, we are eagerly anticipating the Wii U exclusive title when it hits shelves on September 26. Read the full interview transcript over at Nintendo Life.