Next, the motion sensor. I had been thinking about direct controls like swinging a remote to have Link swing his sword and wanted to push the experience of playing even further. When we tried changing the camera perspective from one that normally is in third person to one that switches to Link's first-person perspective in battle. Please watch this movie. For this prototype, all we did was change this perspective to the first-person view we currently had. We haven't tweaked things like the spacing between Link and enemies, so it's really awkward, but having played this version in first person, we didn't think this was the most effective way of presenting battles. Link normally has a variety of movements, but when he enters into battle with his enemies, which has come to be known as core scene in Zelda, if that variety is lost, it feels very strange.
So, we brought the camera back to the third-person view and swung the Wii remote like a sword. This time we saw problems that we hadn't noticed when the camera was in the first-person perspective, and we made the decision to abandon using the motion sensor to swing the sword. The reason for this is that the player character of Link is left handed. You see, when a player had the Wii remote in his right hand and swung it, it felt strange because on the screen Link would swing the sword that was in his left hand, and this was something that couldn't be avoided. This might seem trivial, but the act of shaking the remote is a control that the player physically experiences, and if it doesn't match up with what is happening on the screen, then it becomes something that has no effect at all, and ultimately this becomes something that is considered extraneous control.
Because the sword control was the most direct in Zelda, it was the one that we most wanted to implement, so we were very disappointed that we could not use it. We settled upon the assigning sword swinging to the B trigger played in the past. ...
Key assignment doesn't seem like a big deal if you look at it objectively, but it was a great challenge to assign the same number of functions with significantly fewer keys to work with, and once we assigned one, we had to reassign another. That thing happened when we decided to assign items to the B trigger button. Until then, we had been using the B trigger button for the sword control, but actually, ever since we started reconsidering the key assignment for the sword at E3, we already decided that we had to go with another control, the control that users wanted to perform. I'm talking about the motion sensor swing. When we were developing the E3 version, we knew that it felt strange for Link to be left-handed, so we removed that, but if we still wanted to implement that control, we would have to make him right-handed. However, in order to do this, we would have had to redo Link's character in the game, which, with only four months left in development, would have been impossible.
It was at that time that we thought if we flipped the entire world laterally, so that left and right were reversed, Link would be right-handed, and that decision to use this bold solution was made. Some of the staff members criticized the idea, saying that it wasn't the final course layout that they designed and that the composition would be thrown off. They had a hard time with it at first, but after personally playing the game, the feeling of strangeness was gone after only a week, and in contrast, the original GameCube version started to feel strange. I knew that end users would feel the same way and I convinced my staff of this as well. Of course, the effect of these changes was immense, and giving the player the ability to swing the remote to make Link swing his sword was imperative to this game.
Unbeatable quote from Legend of Neil!