Nintendo doing things their own way is nothing new. The company has been carving their own path for decades now, and they continue to take wild swings and push forward into uncharted territory. Without that sense of individualism and a slavish approach to doing things their own way, Nintendo continues to find success.
One of the many ways Nintendo is different from most developers is in how they craft games. Countless devs and pubs will tell you that they first come up with a game’s story, and then they figure out the gameplay design and mechanics. With Nintendo things are completely flopped, and that’s especially true of the Legend of Zelda franchise.
While we’ve known for awhile now that Nintendo handles gameplay first and then story second, now we have some insight into that direction as it pertains to Zelda. In an interview with the Washington Post, Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma explains not only why Nintendo tackles gameplay first, but how he would have trouble trying to do things the other way around.
“I’ve never really made a game where you think of the story first and then go into gameplay. First when you think of the gameplay, what you’re trying to think of after that is how you can get players to understand that gameplay. The story becomes used as a vessel because it has a beginning and end and the player moves through it. I think it would actually be kind of difficult to do the reverse and start with the story, then try to match the gameplay mechanics to that.”
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