The irritating fairy never quite convinced Miyamoto.
One of the most recurrent phrases within the gamer community is the classic “Hey Listen!” of Navi in the classic The Legend of Zelda: Oracina of Time, which continues to play today. This little fairy became famous for how irritating it could be at times. Its function was to help the player in moments where he did not know how to advance, and although he fulfilled this task, it is clear that it was a very difficult idea to implement. Even Sigeru Miyamoto himself, in an old interview that was originally published in a strategy magazine in 1999, recognizes that the system was not user-friendly at all.
Within this interview, which we know thanks to the fact that it has now been published on the internet and is publicly accessible, we can find different statements about this decision on Miyamoto’s part: “If you read Navi’s text, she says the same thing over and over again. I know this makes it sound bad, but we left this level of ‘stupidity’ on purpose,” says Miyamoto.
“I think that if we had tried to make the Navi tracks more sophisticated, that ‘stupidity’ would have stood out even more. The truth is that I wanted to remove the entire system, but that would have been even more inaccessible to gamers,” Miyamoto acknowledges.
To conclude this topic, Miyamoto clarifies the following: “You can think of Navi as being there for players who have quit playing for a month or so, who then pick up the game again and want to remember what they were supposed to do.” A system that It has come to be used a lot in video games in the form of newspapers or the like, although today its use is less widespread.
From what can be seen in the interview, one of the pillars of development in Ocarina of Time was its difficulty. The team spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to guide the player through this new and extensive Hyrule.
Miyamoto also gave much importance to combat with the sword, which he tried to simplify due to his difficulty with action games. On this subject, he also states the following: “I’m pretty bad at action games, so I wanted Ocarina to have a system with depth, something that would allow you to get better little by little the more you played, although it didn’t need to be something as complex as Tekken, of course.”
Finally Miyamoto also talks about being in charge of Ocarina of Time convey the feeling that it was a Zelda. For him, this feeling is defined as “Novelty, mystery, with a certain inimitable quality… The truth is that I think you can analyze it from an infinite number of points of view”.
The full interview, which was conducted in 1999 for a Japanese strategy guide, can be found in full English completely free of charge and has allowed us to know more about how was the development of one of the most iconic games in the entire video game industry What do you think of Miyamoto’s opinions? Do you agree or do you think Navi was nicer than people remember?
Related topics: Zelda
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