Home > Shigeru Miyamoto Disappointed with Zelda II
In a recent interview with Kotaku, Shigeru Miyamoto talks about the disappointments he had with Zelda II and what he would have liked to further expand upon to make the game better. While a lot of Zelda fans agree that Zelda II was not what they expected, what do you think Miyamoto thought was wrong?
"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,"
Alright...so Zelda II could have been better but what would go back and do differently if you could?
"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."
Interesting insight into game development but what we would like to know is how you wanted the game to turn out - what did you want to do that wasn't possible due to hardware limitations?
"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."
That sounds like it would have been able to make the game better for all. One thing I would have loved to see is how he would have implemented the view switching had the hardware been capable. What do you think abut this insight into Miyamoto's disappointments with Zelda II?
About the Author:
Austin Dickson
Austin Dickson has been around the Zelda fandom for years. He started Link's Hideaway as a small personal project, which later turned into something of which he never thought possible. He enjoys writing articles, guides, walkthroughs, and developing the different Concealed Gaming network sites.
