An interview has just been published with Miyamoto of the year 1999, which would serve to revive the collective hatred towards navithe Jar Jar Binks of Zelda. If you’ve been under a rock in a deeper sleep than Link’s in Ocarina of Time, Navi is the little fairy that follows you everywhere and yells at you: “Hears! Listen“.”If you read Navi’s text, it says the same things over and over again“said Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of The Legend of Zelda.”I know it sounds bad, but we purposely left it on some kind of ‘stupid’ level.“.
This fairy has earned a reputation for being annoying and intrusive, with her obvious innuendoes making her tiresome. But it turns out that not even the creator of Zelda I wanted her in the game. “I think if we had tried to make the Navi tracks more sophisticated, that ‘stupidity’ would have stood out even more.“, he continued Miyamoto. “The truth is that I wanted to eliminate the entire system, but that would have been even worse for the players“.
Ocarina of Time introduced navi, but it was a necessary evil in many ways. It was the first Zelda in 3D, a substantial change from the classic top-down games. This meant a new learning curve, which even players familiar with the series would have to overcome. It added a lot of now-standard RPG elements, like parrying, dodging, and third-person action, things we now take for granted.
But clues were needed at the time, since they weren’t mechanics that people were used to. That’s where Navi came in. “I’m pretty bad at action games myself, so I wanted Ocarina to have a system with depth, something that you could constantly improve the more you played.“, he added Miyamoto. “Although it didn’t have to be as complex as Tekken, of course“.
navi he has since appeared in the spin-off Hyrule Warriors and is one of Young Link’s taunts in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but due to his negative reception, he has not been a key character in a main game since Ocarina of Time.