Miyamoto Says Wind Waker Was Boring

Eurogamer has a talk with Shigeru Miyamoto, maker of the Legend of Zelda series, where he reveals frustrations with The Wind Waker. From the article: "At the end of the production we fought against the clock and there were parts that I was forced to approve even though it didn't feel complete...I apologise that we didn't fix the triforce hunt at the end of the game. It was slow and dull." Seems like designers slagging their old games is a growing trend.

Comments

This Always Happens

[th1ckasabr1ck]

Working in game development can be frusterating this way. The limiting factor for EVERY game is ALWAYS time. Unless you're id Software and can say "It's done when it's done", time is your #1 enemy. It's possible that Zelda is/was in a situation comparable to Id, but I think they really needed to get that game done when they did in order to try to move some Gamecubes.

In the past there have been countless things that I would have loved to have coded into game X but just didn't have time. From the publisher's point of view: Adding this neat little feature isn't going to sell any more copies, so just fix these crash bugs and let's ship it. The bigger the publisher the worse you see this. Sad but true.

Also I agree that Windwaker was boring. It got cut a lot of slack just because it was a Zelda game. Anytime I actually put down the controller to wait for my guy to get where he's going in a game is a bad sign. The dungeons were cool in Windwaker, but the rest of the game was dull.

All the little sidequests I found resulted in more and more rupees. My bag was always maxed out and I had no idea what to spend them on anyways. Wow a 500 rupee reward! Sounds great right? Well I get 0 of those because my bag is already full.

The actual dungeons were fun enough, I really wish there were more of them. The sailing was incredibly tedious and the triforce quest was the most tedious task I've had in a game for quite some while.

Hopefully Twilight Princess is more focused than Windwaker was.

Re:This Always Happens

[mouse_clicker]

Also I agree that Windwaker was boring. It got cut a lot of slack just because it was a Zelda game.

It was cut some slack because it was a Zelda game? I think it's just the opposite, it was scrutinized more because it was a Zelda game, it had a standard to live up that was set by what many consider the best games there are. If Wind Waker had been released by a different developer and without the Zelda property, it would've been hailed as a masterpiece. But because it was a Nintendo game, and especially because it was a Zelda game, people picked it apart and talked about every little problem the game had.

Re:Main Zelda story lines aren't a concern...

[AuMatar]

Personally, I play Zelda for the dungeons. I love going in, trying to find my way to the boss/items, the challenges and puzzles of the different rooms, and finally killing the boss. I don't really like or do many of the side quests, only those requied to get to the next dungeon, or which I blunder into. Oh, and the originality of some of the items and swapping weapons is cool too.

My problems with Windwalker:

1)Too few dungeons. There were what, 3 or 4? 5?
2)The sea was too large, and the actual land too small. Too much travel to get to important places.
3)The triforce part sucked. It was unintuitive, and boring. I almost quit when I found out what I had to do. This was a perfect spot to add more dungeons too. Especially if the dungeons harkened back to the original zelda with the 8 triforce thing- it would have been so cool to need to use the wind baton thingy to get rid of a lake and find the dungeon.

Probably why the SNES Zelda is still my favorite- a huge number of dungeons (10 or so?), a lot of fun puzzles, and the introduction of a lot of neat new items.

Re:Deadlines?

[edwdig]

Metroid skipping a generation had nothing to do with slow schedules. Metroid's sales are far better in the US than in Japan. Being as Japan-centric as Nintendo is, they simply looked at the Japanese market and decided there wasn't much demand for a new Metroid game. They only decided to release it after being pestered repeatedly for it by people in the US for several years.

Re:Deadlines?

[Spleener12]

Actually, it was Aonuma who was primarily in charge of the game (he's also the guy behind Majora's Mask), and as Mr. Rossel-Waugh says, if it was one of Miyamoto's pet projects, perhaps it would have been pushed back as long as necessary.

I never understood the hype behind this game

[Jackmn]

I played the WW all the way through, and came out thorougly dissatisfied.

* Relatively few puzzles and easy boss fights marred the game. This is the biggest problem I had with WW. A game cannot be fun without being challenging.

* Sailing the ocean was enjoyable at first, but became tedious very quickly.

* The stealth bits in the game were just plain obnoxious.

* The swordsmaster minigame where you had to land one thousand hits was equally terrible.

Personally I liked the Ocarian of Time far more than this. Which is great, because a Gamecube version of the game (along with a more challenging adaptation of it) came with my copy of WW.

Re:Why aren't you playing Game Boy Advance?

[macshit]

I completely disagree with your trashing of all 3d games. Mario 64 and the two Zelda games on the N64 stand as three of the best games of all time, an opinion I share with a great majority of the gaming community. To claim that these games are all just clones of Tomb Raider is... just inconcievable.

Same thing for Metroid Prime. I'm a huge fan of the original 2d metroid games, and MP completely and utterly nails the feel of those games. It's an incredible game (MP2 is great as well), and more than worthy as the current bearer of the metroid standard.

To claim that it's "just another FPS" is simply bizarre.