Miyamoto feels Zelda II could have been much more

With all the excitement that E3 brings for gamers, one of the highlights for me is seeing people taking the opportunity to sit down with developers and talk with them about… well, everything. Kotaku writer Stephen Totilo recently had this chance in a Pikmin 3 playing session with the famous Shigeru Miyamoto, and he asked a few questions that some people have not touched on before.

Among the things Totilo asked Miyamoto, there was not much Zelda discussion, but a seemingly offhand comment did lead to a very interesting piece of information: Miyamoto considers Zelda II: The Adventure of Link to be the closest thing to a “bad game” he’s ever made. Jump inside to read Miyamoto’s full comments on the subject.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever made a bad game, per se, but a game I think we could have done more with was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. When we’re designing games, we have our plan for what we’re going to design but in our process it evolves and grows from there. In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper.

I think specifically in the case of Zelda II we had a challenge just in terms of what the hardware was capable of doing.

So one thing, of course, is, from a hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two. But, because of the limitations on how quickly those scenes changed, we weren’t able to.

The other thing is it would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn’t capable of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot of effort.

Miyamoto is famous for his perfectionist view on the games he makes, always insisting on releasing a game later rather than let it hit stores incomplete. For him to say something like this is a bit unexpected, but not too surprising considering the high standards he holds his work to.

What are your thoughts on Miyamoto’s statement? Do you feel the same way about Zelda II, and if so what do you think the game’s concept would have looked like if the team that made it had more “breathing room” than was offered on the NES/Famicom’s hardware? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Source: Kotaku via GoNintendo