An interview with Shigeru Miyamoto from a 1999 Japanese strategy guide for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has surfaced online, along with an English translation provided by Shmuplations.com. Within the publication, Miyamoto shared some developer insight on the Nintendo 64 action-adventure RPG that would later become a timeless and revolutionary classic.
One of the more interesting pieces of info from the interview comes from Miyamoto’s apparent dislike of Link’s infamous navigator companion Navi, who acted as a tutorial of sorts for the game. Many Zelda fans have voiced their opinions over the years that they find the character to be quite annoying, but it may come as a surprise that the series’ creator actually agrees with this notion.
“I think the way we give hints is still a little too unfriendly. Speaking plainly, I can now confess to you: I think the whole system with Navi giving you advice is the biggest weakpoint of Ocarina of Time. It’s incredibly difficult to design a system that gives proper advice, advice that’s tailored to the player’s situation. To do it right, you’d have to spend the same amount of time as you would developing an entire game, and I was very worried we’d be digging ourselves into a hole, if we pursued perfection there…
If you read Navi’s text, she says the same things over and over. I know it makes it sound bad, but we purposely left her at a kind of “stupid” level. I think if we’d tried to make Navi’s hints more sophisticated, that “stupidity” would have actually stood out even more. The truth is I wanted to remove the entire system, but that would have been even more unfriendly to players. You can think of Navi as being there for players who stop playing for a month or so, who then pick the game back up and want to remember what they were supposed to do. It’s a brazen excuse, I know. (laughs)
Otherwise, we tried to make the hints friendly for players, but I heard many people saying how they couldn’t solve them without a strategy guide. When we took a closer look, though, we’ve found that the sections people need hints for vary from person-to-person. There’s no consistency. That can’t be helped, though, in a game like Zelda which combines action and puzzle solving.”
– Shigeru Miyamoto (translation via Shmuplations)
If you’re interested in checking out the full interview for more even more details on the development of Ocarina of Time, including Miyamoto’s thoughts on difficulty implementation, unexplained timeline and story mysteries, how he gave the game a “Zelda vibe” when transitioning the franchise into 3D for the first time, the scrapped cameo appearance of Chain Chomp from the Super Mario series, and much more, make sure to do so by visiting Shmuplations.com here.
