GamesActionThe Legend of ZeldaThe Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of TimeZelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto always knew that Navi was the “biggest weakpoint of Ocarina of Time” and once said “I wanted to remove the entire system"When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesActionThe Legend of ZeldaThe Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of TimeZelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto always knew that Navi was the “biggest weakpoint of Ocarina of Time” and once said “I wanted to remove the entire system"When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Nintendo)
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is an all-time classic - an early masterpiece of 3D gaming whose influence can still be seen to this day, and unquestionably one of thebest N64 gamesever made. But people have been complaining about Link’s fairy companion Navi and her annoying advice since the game’s launch in 1998, and she arguably set the stage for decades worth of irritating tutorials and hints in video games. It turns out that even Shigeru Miyamoto himself always knew that Navi’s role in the N64 classic was less than ideal.
Miyamoto went on to say that “if you read Navi’s text, she says the same things over and over. I know it makes it sound bad, but we purposely left her at a kind of ‘stupid’ level. I think if we’d tried to make Navi’s hints more sophisticated, that ‘stupidity’ would have actually stood out even more. The truth is I wanted to remove the entire system, but that would have been even more unfriendly to players. You can think of Navi as being there for players who stop playing for a month or so, who then pick the game back up and want to remember what they were supposed to do. It’s a brazen excuse, I know. (laughs)”
These days, Ocarina of Time is not considered a particularly difficult game, but when it was new players were still coming to terms with the very idea of solving puzzles and fighting monsters in a 3D space. Miyamoto comes back to the struggle of balancing the game’s difficulty level several times over the course of the interview, noting that despite all of Navi’s hints about the puzzles, he “heard many people saying how they couldn’t solve them without a strategy guide.”
A universal solution to the problem of difficult puzzles is tough to implement - just look at theresponse to God of War Ragnarok’s overly generous hintsif you want a modern example. “We’ve found that the sections people need hints for vary from person-to-person,” Miyamoto said of Ocarina of Time. “There’s no consistency. That can’t be helped, though, in a game like Zelda which combines action and puzzle solving.”
While historically Nintendo has downplayed the influence of other popular games on its own work, in this interview Miyamoto did cite Japan’s most beloved RPG series as a lamppost for making challenging games. “Even in the Dragon Quest series,” Miyamoto said, “people don’t praise [designer Yuji] Horii and [director and programmer Koichi] Nakamura for the exquisite balance; it’s rather that the unforgiving difficulty in some places ended up making it more memorable.”
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Ocarina of Time still ranks among thebest Zelda gamesever.
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1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
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