Eiji Aonuma goes over how a Zelda Dungeon is made, and the emotions of Majora’s Mask.

Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr +

A recent Kotaku interview with Eiji Aonuma details what goes into making a Zelda dungeon. Aonuma has been an enormous part of developing many of our favorite Zelda games. Most recently, the new Majora’s Mask, 3D remake. In this interview, Aonuma goes over how exactly a dungeon is made. He also goes into some of the backstory of Majora’s Mask.

Kotaku: How do you create a Zelda dungeon? How does that process work? How long does it take?

Eiji Aonuma: Well, the first thing that we ask ourselves when we’re designing a new dungeon is what sort of gameplay do we want the player to engage with. And that will help us decide on a kind of theme for that dungeon. For example, are we trying to build a dungeon around puzzle type gameplay, or is action more of a focus? And once we’ve decided on a theme along those lines, we’ll start to think about how a player might use a particular item in that dungeon to interact with the environment. Up until this point all of that is kind of laying out the theory of what kind of dungeon this is going to be and from that point we move on to implementation.

Now, this is sort of like the orthodox version of how to create Zelda dungeons, but I should bring up something that’s really important to us now is that we feel it’s important to challenge the orthodoxy of the Zelda series as we’re creating new games. So while we still need to look for some themes early on, we do want to look at interesting ways to make departures from the rest.

Going into how much time, and how many people it takes to create a dungeon, Aonuma goes on to explain one dungeon that he started to develop in Majora’s Mask.

The one that really stands out to me of the dungeons is Woodfall. This was right after the development of Ocarina of Time had finished and we knew we wanted to make a different sort of dungeon. And this is one where I ended up stepping into the role of directing the creation of the dungeon specifically. The person who had been specifically in charge of dungeons up to that point had just changed over. I knew that what I wanted to give it more flavor. I think I was responsible for maybe half of it and I think the new person working on dungeons did the other half in this case.

It depends on the project, I guess is the best way to answer this. In the case of Ocarina of Time I did the original layout for each of the dungeons, but that’s really rough to try to do that all on one person. You can approach the schedule in a slightly different way where you have a different person assigned to each dungeon in the planning role, but that’s not something you can do when you have a really small team, of course. These days, we have larger teams and all of them come on with the experience of having played previous Zelda games, so it’s a little easier to divide that out now.

The interview goes on to detail one characteristic that sets Majora’s Mask apart from the rest of the series. The emotion. One big feeling that most players get from the game is that it has a much darker, sadder tone; having to replay the same three-day cycle over and over again, as you witness the despair of Termina. Aonuma proceeds to say how the emotion in the game was more of a motivator for the player.

“And you had a similar situation in Ocarina of Time, where Ganon was threatening to destroy this world, a hero rises to oppose him. But it didn’t have that same sort of tone. It was more a hero story there. In this particular case, we’re looking at a slightly different way to tell that, which is that the sadness of this world can also raise a hero.”

The interview continues as Aonuma talks on one of the most impactful side quests in Majora’s Mask, which is the wedding quest involving Anju and Kafei. He also explains how he got the idea while going to the wedding of a staff member.

Check out the full interview below.

Source: Kotaku

Share.

About Author

I'm a junior in high school and I love Zelda. Ever since I got the collectors edition on the GameCube, I've been hooked. In my free time, I like to act, write, make art and play games.