Aonuma Famitsu June 2011 Interview

Link

Aonuma talks about the Skyward Sword and there a good and bad news, like always. I'll just quote the important parts:

"The game starts in Skyloft, this city that's floating in the air, and you'll come back to this town multiple times," Aonuma said. "Things are always proceeding along in town, and in that respect it's very much like Majora's Mask. Like with Majora, there are a lot of game events involving the townspeople that get intertwined with the main story."

This is good news. I'm a big fan of Majora's Mask and it's Clocktown concept and it's great to hear that there will be finally a deeper level of NPC interaction again, which was just completely lacking in Twilight Princess for example. I guess that every NPC will have a daily routine, instead of staying in the same place all the time. The three day cycle was exclusive to Majora's Mask's time travelling system, so I don't think we will get something as complex, but probably more complex than what we got in other Zelda games. The Wind Waker also tried Lunar Phases, you basically had an entire week there. But it only affected the location of the Ghost Ship and what Legendary Pictograph would be available. Also, some treasures were only visible during full moon. The problem with the week system was, that it's just too many days. In worst case, if you need to get to a certain week day, you will have to play the Song of Passing 13 times. Of course they could just make a song, where you can select the exact date, which would make things much faster.

But this also adds to the fact, that this might be the "Aonuma Best Of". Visually it's a hybrid between The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, content-wise it got Clocktown from Majora's Mask, the ocean from The Wind Waker, the Twilight Realm from Twilight Princess, as well as the Phantoms and the "less but more useful items"-concept from the Nintendo DS Zeldas. I would call it a "Best of Zelda", like some people do, but I'm still skeptical if this game will succeed to capture what made the Zelda classics great and ideas like the ocean world or the Twilight Realm weren't really favored and won't ever contribute to a "best Zelda game".

Next quote:

"This game's plot is something like a school drama, you could say," Aonuma noted with a laugh. "The flying sequence at the E3 demo is Link competing against his classmates. One of them looks kind of a like a bad guy, as you saw, and he shows up in other ways in the game too, since he has a major thing for Zelda."

So, I hope Zelda will be a cheerleader then? The sluttier she dresses, the more I'm willing to rescue her! No, seriously, I'm trying to remain calm about these news and just wait how it will play out. After all Aonuma says this with a laugh. But we all agree, that nobody wants a Zelda version of High School Musical. But it came to my mind, that Ocarina of Time wasn't any different. The Kokiri Forest was one huge kindergarten, Mido was the bully, who was jealous of Link and that he was Saria's best friend and chosen by the Deku Tree. So, from kindergarten we now got to high school. However, at E3 2009 they showed this cool artwork of Link and everybody liked, how he looked more mature than any other Link before. But now Link will be some school boy, which is definitely disappointing.

But I'm more concerned about how much all of this will stall you from getting into the actual game. If it takes you longer than 15 minutes to get into the first dungeon, the game is broken. Majora's Mask would be the only exception, because this game was not designed around dungeon gameplay, but around Clock Town. Skyward Sword is clearly designed around dungeon gameplay, the entire overworld is said to be a dungeon before the dungeons. And I like how Skyloft will be your safe haven from the hardships in the world below. But it shouldn't keep you from getting there. It was a brutal mistake of Twilight Princess, that you had to endure tons of story setup, tutorials and forced sidequests like playing dumb minigames or feeding a cat before anything fun happened. It takes you like three hours to get into the first dungeon. This was terrible and Skyward Sword shouldn't do the same mistake. But we will already get the flying tutorial minigame, which is aweful. If I need to do a tutorial for anything, the mechanics must be broken and not intuitive. Tutorials should always be optional, like in Ocarina of Time. If you have problems with playing the game, there are signs and people helping you out. But if you know the drill, nothing stops you from getting to the first dungeon and kicking ass (except Mido, who wants you to collect sword and shield, but this is a fast task). Forced tutorials suck and only prevent you from having fast fun.



^who wants to take this test? Me don't.

Next quote:

"With previous Zeldas, the common pattern was that the really neat items wouldn't show up until later on in the game. You need to have the basic item set or it wouldn't be Zelda, so the new items tended to get shunted to the latter part of the game. [Shigeru] Miyamoto said that had to change, like 'This is neat, let's bring it out from the start.' So a lot of neat new items will show up pretty early on."

This is a good idea. In Twilight Princess we had the problem, that some items weren't used outside of the dungeons, where you would find them. The Spinner is a popular example. The Nintendo DS Zeldas tried to solve this problem by only having very few items with many uses, like in the first Zelda game. This was already not bad and Skyward Sword also only will have eight main items next to sword and shield. But getting all items earlier might be a fun twist. And remember, that each or at least most of the items will feature upgrades like the claws for the Beetle. So, there will be still new stuff to look forward to even later in the game.

There's some stuff about Link's red bird being special (of course!) and the Ghirahim fight, but I'll skip over that to the next quote:

"This game talks about the birth of the Master Sword, and it touches on why Ganondorf showed up. If you play it, I think you'll get some understanding on that. It connects to Ocarina, so if you play Ocarina of Time 3D and move on to this game, I think you'll catch on to a lot of things."

I can't wait to see how both games will connect in the end.

"The whole game is complete, and we're fine-tuning the balance right now. We were going to have it wholly done by around E3, but there's so much volume to it, neither I nor Miyamoto have gotten to fully play out every aspect. The non-English localizations are proceeding along now, and we're trying to make this a simultaneous worldwide release. You have to put Zelda all out at once or else the story's going to get spoiled -- although, really, there's a ton to enjoy here even if you know a little about the story beforehand."

Best news from the whole interview. The game is finished and they are polishing it up right now. Well, after five years it should be finished, I was expecting a holiday 2010 release after all, the game is at least one year late. And there's so much content, that even the producers couldn't play it all! I guess the new director, Hidemaro Fujibayashi, is a hardworking man. And a simultaneous worldwise release is important, I remember Youtube recommended me to watch the Ganondorf battle from Twilight Princess one month before the game was available in Europe, so it's good that we will get one.

Via Zelda Informer

The Wind Waker: Link's Logbook

Hahaaaa, surprise! I wasn't done with the Zelda mangas yet, this is a special extra episode! Actually this wasn't drawn by Akira Himekawa and that's probably what makes it so good and entertaining. It's not even your typical Zelda manga, it's a 4-koma, a collection of sketches following the plot of The Wind Waker. Basically each page is an individual sketch and they do a great job of parodying the game. Some sketches are just silly, while others don't work, because they use Japanese puns that can't be translated properly. But others will definitely make you smile, like this one:



And others are just hilarious. Some of them really made laugh, I had more fun reading this than reading the entire Himekawa collection. Seriously. And you can have fun reading it too, just by clicking here. I normally wouldn't promote any scanlations or other illegal material, but this book is not available in the US or Europe. If they also would release this here in Germany, I'd buy it.

Well, and because it was so much fun, here are some more random sketches as a preview:



I just love how they make fun of the game's ideas and mechanics. We all know the parodies, where Link runs into a house, destroys all pots and then just leaves without saying anything. But this book really takes it further, it deals with ideas like "what does Zelda do when she has to wait all the time?" And they make good use of Toon Link's face, he just looks so silly some times, but it really fits the 4-koma style.

Four Swords Manga

Last but not least I will talk about the Four Swords Manga. Well, it's called "Four Swords" in Germany, but actually it's based on Four Swords Adventures or "Four Swords Plus" in Japan. And it's okay. It does the right thing by focusing on having four Links, that's pretty much the main feature of the story. Like Ocarina of Time, this manga comes in two books.

It starts with Link, who's already a hero, but also a blockhead, who only fights on his own. He doesn't want to work together with his father, who is a knight of Hyrule, or anyone else. Of course this ultimately leads to the problem, where he has to work together with three other versions of himself in order to defeat the bad guys. The moral of the whole story is pretty much just about team work. Link got split up in four personalities, the red Link is the cute optimistic guy, the blue Link is hot-tempered and the purple Link is the thinker. And don't how to describe the green Link, he's pretty much just normal. However, naturally they struggle to work together for a while.

They all get split up and have to find each other again. However, they get split up by some force, which is never really explained. Green Link lands in the Desert, Red Link at Kakariko Village, Blue Link in Frozen Hyrule and Purple Link somewhere else (I won't spoil his part). But they find each other again really fast, they somehow get teleported all over the place, which is really weird. But okay, they get teleported to their next destinations in the games, too.

There was one scene, where two of the Links fight each other in an arena placed on lava. This totally reminded me of the Shadow Battles mode and the whole concept of this fight probably came from there.



Well, and then there's Shadow Link. Unlike in the game, there's only one of him, he's an individual in this story. And in the end he even joins the good side, but his role was never really convincing. I prefer the Dark Link, who doesn't talk and just faces Link in a duel or does nasty stuff.

After reading nine Zelda mangas I got my hopes up, that Tingle won't be in any of them. But my hopes were crushed immediatly at the beginning of the 2nd part of Four Swords, where Tingle finally appears. He's all about Force Gems, but luckily he doesn't have many scenes in the manga.

What I really liked about the manga was that it made me wanna play the game. This was not the case with any of the other mangas, but when reading Four Swords I really wanted to replay some of the levels. And I probably will do that later as part of my 25th Anniversary replay orgy.

Well, this is the end of my Zelda manga review special. I hope that some of my shared thoughts were interesting. However, this will probably not be the last manga from Akira Himekawa, Spirit Tracks would be a possible candidate or Link's Awakening, which was recently re-released on 3DS Virtual Console.

Oracle of Ages Manga

The Oracle of Ages mangas continues the story of Oracle of Seasons. Sadly the lovely Din doesn't appear in the manga except for some short flashback, but overall the story was much more smartly written, so the manga ended up being quite enjoyable as well.

Link became a skilled knight by now and at the behest of Zelda he and Impa go to Lybranna to escort Nayru back to Hyrule for her own safety, because Zelda saw shadows surrounding her. However, Veran takes over Impa's and then Nayru's body and the chaos begins. In the past Link meets Raven, who his ancestor. Link recognized him from a painting in grandfather's house. He's a knight in the house of Queen Ambi, but he also cares for a hidden village, where he brings the innocent people, who where supposed to be executed. And there's this little girl with a sapling, which later gets important and stuff. Well, Himekawa added a lot to the overall story, but it works fine and makes it much more alive and believeable. The time travelling mechanics and effects don't make much sense, but it was the same in the original game, so I don't blame Himekawa for that.

There's also the plot hole, where Veran zips into Ralph's body for quite a while. In the meantime Nayru should have been able to save herself... but oh well, it's by far not as bad as the plot holes in the Majora's Mask manga.

Link doesn't really have a party here, but Raven and Ralph join forces with him to defeat Veran. There's a funny twist, how they got Ralph back into the story. At the beginning Link takes the Harp of Ages from him and says good bye. But he then loses the harp and Ralph finds it in a Magic Shop four hundred years later. I thought that was funny. Also, at the end Link returns to his grandparents only to discover, that there's a painting of himself as a knight from the Queen Ambi times. His grandfather then tells him, that he was named after that Link and that this guy should be his hero. That was kind of funny and a nice conclusion for the manga. The grandparents helped to keep both mangas together, as a prolog and epilog basically.

Well, it's like I said at the beginning. The Ages manga lacks the beauty of Din, while Nayru can be also very charming, she's possessed by Veran for the most time, but on the other hand the overall storyline is much better than the simple "go from A to B"-plot in Seasons.

Now only the Four Swords manga is left, which is a two-parter.

Oracle of Seasons Manga

That's more like it. I guess the less story there's in a game, the easier it is for Akira Himekawa to make a good manga out of it. There they can amplify and change the story to their liking without hurting the game's original framework plot. It might even be the reason, why Himekawa chose to make mangas for games like Four Swords Adventures and A Link to the Past over games like The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. There they have the necessary freedom to write a good story and come up with their own ideas.

I have to say that the Oracles manga is definitely my favorite of the bunch. It's not perfect and I've read far better stories, but it's overall enjoyable and made good use of the game's original plots.

I'll admit that the main reason why I like this manga is the beautiful portrayal of Din. She's just magical and you really can't blame Link, that he immediatly falls in love with her, though she's probably too old for him. But if this would be adult Link, I'd say she's the perfect girl for him, she's something special, but also a lot more down-to-earth than let's say a princess. The manga is also the reason, why Din became one of my favorite girls in the Zelda series, even though she's not doing much in the games. But Link fells for her anyway and really wants to save her. Can't think of a better motivation.

What's also cool is, that Link basically builds up a party like in some JRPG or other Japanese fantasy stories. His first companion is some chicken, I'll get to that later. Then there's Ricky, though he's basically the Jar Jar Binks of this story, he's really annoying. I thought he was much cooler in the game. Then they are joined by Maple, who wants to get the Rod of Seasons for herself. And in the end there's also Moosh. No sign of Dimitri in both mangas, however. Well, there's one cool scene, where the entire party is surrounded by tons of monster including several bosses like Gohma, Gleeock or Aquamentus. That panel was pretty epic.

Well, the story completely skips over the dungeons, only some of the bosses appear as the bad guys. And I think this was the right choice, it would be boring to watch Link collect some essences. Basically it starts out with Link living by his grandparents, his grandfather really wants him to become a knight, but Link rather wants to live his own life. So, he leaves and ends up going to the knight qualifying test in Hyrule Castle Town anyway. There he gets in some trouble and somehow ends up by the Triforce. It sends him to Holodrum, where meets Din and gets the hots for her. So he joins the gypsies, but at some point they arrive at the Temple of Seasons, where Onox awaits Din, captures her and sinks the temple. Link decides to rescue her, meets up with Ricky and they accidently get caught in a portal to Subrosia, where they find the Temple and Maple. Equipped with the Rod of Seasons, they cut their way to Onox's castle and save the day. At the end Zelda appears and confers knighthood on Link. It's a simple story, but it works.

Well, there's also some weird stuff. One is the "Navi Chicken", I call that chicken that way, because it's basically a Navi replacement. I guess there's no way Link could survive without a sidekick, who tells him what to do. At the beginning it's just some normal chicken, but because of the Triforce Link can suddenly understand what it says and even gets awefully lots of knowledge about everything because of the Triforce. It doesn't make sense at all, but it's by far not as bad as some stuff in the Majora's Mask manga. Also, the Maku Tree appears, but unlike the Deku Tree he doesn't talk, but Link reads his mind... wtf? I guess Himekawa didn't get, that this was basically another Deku Tree, just watching over Holodrum.

I will continue to talk about the Oracle of Ages manga in my next post.

Majora's Mask Manga

I don't know where to begin... I don't even know, if Akira Himekawa understood anything in the game. It's not like they just did the usual plot transforming like in the other Zelda mangas, most of it doesn't make any sense at all...

It starts with Deku Link confronting the Skull Kid on the tower. There the moon crashes into Termina, but for some totally unexplained reason the clock was turned back for some minutes, Link wonders why the time skipped back and THEN he gets the Ocarina of Time to play the Song of Time, which warps him back three days. But what was that time skip before? It just happened for no reason. And when Link arrives back at the beginning of the three days, he just loses his Deku form without any reason. It just happens without any explanation. The Happy Mask Salesman is there, but he only asks Link to get Majora's Mask back. He didn't help him with the Deku form (which was the original deal between the two in the game) and the Song of Healing is not part of the manga. Link just randomly plays something on his Ocarina, when the souls of Darmina and Mikau are manifested in masks. Epona gets stolen by Skull Kid at the beginning, then she doesn't appear in the entire story, only to appear out of nowhere at the end of the manga. "Hey Epona, there you are! Hahahaha!" Lot's of stuff just happens without any reason or explanation and it's a giant mess. I would even go as far and say that this is worst of the mangas yet, because the other mangas' stories at least made sense.

Also, except for the unexplained time skip and the Song of Time session at the beginning of the story, there's no time travel. None at all. He just repeats those three days once and in these three days he explores entire Termina setting all four giants free. You can do that in the actual game, but you need to be REALLY good. And Himekawa saved himself/herself/themselves (how am I supposed to refer to a female mangaka couple that goes under a male name?) the trouble of dealing with the issue of repeating three days and watching the world go down over and over again. Which was one of the central dilemmas of the game. It's like a dark, psychological and epic version of "Groundhog Day". In the manga there's only Anju, who interacts with Deku Link in the first cycle. And in the second cycle Link is sad, because Anju can't remember him. THAT's IT! That's the whole time travel dilemma in the manga, Anju can't remember Link from before... How sad! How terrifying! How overwhelming! I guess the only thing, that was overwhelmed here, was Akira Himekawa. He/she/they probably couldn't comprehend the whole thing. You help people, they become happy, but then you return to the first day and everyone is in despair again. Like nothing what you did mattered. But you can't rescue everyone in this game, you have to focus on the greater good of stopping Majora and the moon. But you have to deal with this problem as the player and it would have been nice to see how Link struggles with this psychological dilemma in the manga. But they totally avoid the whole problem. They took the easy road for this manga and that's lame.

But this wasn't the only thing avoided. Ikana, which is one of my favorite parts in the game, got completely fast forwarded. I guess a society of ghosts and undeads were not interesting enough. And the Romani Ranch got left out completely. Nothing about the Romani Ranch is in the manga, like I already said, Epona just appears out of nowhere at the end of the manga. I guess cow abducting aliens were not interesting enough. However, Akira Himekawa of course had enough pages left to draw a side story. Actually it's a back story, which tells the origin of Majora's Mask. It's supposed to be meaningful and full of symbolic character. However, it doesn't make any sense at all and it completely contradicts with what the Happy Masks Salesman tells you about the origins of the mask in the game. I guess Himekawa wasn't listening at that point.

Damnit, I just don't know what good points I could tell you about the manga, so instead I post a panel of a lovely Gerudo pirate for your enjoyment. At least Himekawa can draw women, sometimes...

Another Amazing 25th Anniversary Fan Art

After spontaneously posting the Duel Link art, I thought I should show this master piece here as well. J2Dstar made this one and it's really awesome. Sometimes I wish I could draw like that, but it's probably really time consuming, so I stick with blogging about Zelda for now... but the scroll is really detailed and features many villains, bosses and enemies on one site and different incarnations of Link on the other. We got Ganondorf, Ganon, Agahnim, Dark Link, Vaati, Gleeock, Volvagia, Patra, a Stalfos, a Bokoblin, a giant Chuchu, an Okotorok, as well as soom Keese and Deku Scrubs on the side of the bad guys. And both versions of the Hero of Hyrule, the Hero of Time, Deku Link, Link from A Link to the Past, the Hero of Wind, three different colored Links from Four Swords using the Roc's Cap, Ordon Link, Wolf Link with Minish Link riding on him and even Link riding on a bird from Skyward Sword on the other side. I guess this would be one epic clash. Nice scroll, you can even buy it in the link printed on the picture.

Via Zelda Informer