Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the latest GameCube version of Nintendo's long-running fantasy adventure series, wowed Los Angeles crowds with its realistic, gritty graphic style. And that's precisely what Eiji Aonuma had in mind.
"Making video games is a business," said Aonuma, "and so you have to strategically consider what markets you're going to appeal to. With Twilight Princess, we had meetings early on with the North American localization team to discuss things like character design, particularly with Link. We're focusing heavily on the American market, and hope it will appeal strongly there."
But the switch to realistic graphics from a more cartoony style hasn't been without its speed bumps. "When you shift to realistic graphics, you can't fool the player any more," Aonuma said. "It no longer makes sense to have the player swing a sword with their left hand, killing an enemy that's on his right.
"We're definitely seeing how hard it is to work with realistic graphics. If I'm showing something realistically, then I have to show the results in a realistic manner as well."
Although Aonuma asserts that the gameplay of Twilight Princess isn't designed for any one group of gamers, one of the sequences shown at E3 -- a dramatic horse-mounted battle -- was the most fast-paced and action-oriented ever seen in a Zelda title.
He is quick to caution, however, that this does not mean the entire game will be full of blazing action. "When Link gets off the horse and back down on the ground, the action is going to be a bit slower. And the reason for that, again, is that with realistic graphics you have to express the world realistically as well. You have to be able to feel the weight of Link's sword as he swings it," Aonuma said.
If the emphasis is on realism, why not incorporate voiced dialog? "I feel like it's not suited to the Zelda series," Aonuma said. "When the player is reading text on the screen, they're inserting a part of themselves, their imagination, into the reading. They fill out the world. But with fully spoken dialogue, everything about the character becomes fixed in place, and you lose a bit of that imaginative aspect.
"That said, I've always felt that if we can use voice in a way that's new and unique, it could be very positive for the Zelda series. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do that in time for the E3 demo, but we do have some ideas that we're thinking about."
Aonuma is also hard at work on two more entries in the Zelda series, for the Revolution and Nintendo DS. Though he shied away from giving out details, he confirmed that the DS title will be primarily controlled with the system's touch screen and stylus pen.
