The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time recently celebrated its 26th anniversary, but you may be surprised to hear that we’re still learning things related to the game many years later. There are even interviews with Nintendo from that time that are only just recently resurfacing, and they offer information that had been unknown until now.
For example, in 1999, Shigeru Miyamoto was interviewed for a Japanese strategy guide. In the interview, which was recently translated by Shmuplations, Miyamoto spoke about Navi, who gives the players hints throughout the game. According to Miyamoto, “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 weak-point 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”.
Miyamoto continued, saying that “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)”.
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