At this precise moment, millions of video game fans are taking their first steps in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the new installment of the long-running adventure saga created by Nintendo. But for this game to expand and for millions to surrender to its rules and challenges, it has been necessary for two Japanese creators, Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi, to conceive it first in their minds.
During the interview that they give exclusively to La Vanguardia and TVE at the European headquarters of Nintendo, in Frankfurt, both the producer and head of the series and the director of the game are carefully measuring all their words so as not to reveal any information about from the plot: “We want players to figure out what’s going on for themselves; if we gave any details we would spoil your fun.” However, they do tell us one of the keys that will most likely make this new installment of Zelda reach an even wider audience than the already highly acclaimed Breath of the Wild.
“Traditionally, Zelda games used to require players to follow certain steps to progress through the adventure, but if they didn’t find them, the game stopped,” Aonuma explains. “Now, in Tears of the Kingdom, you don’t need to follow a certain path, you can go to different places, find out why you can’t move on, and find your own way to overcome the challenge,” the veteran producer points out in a deep voice.
When Eiji Aonuma (Nagano, 1963) talks about the game, he transforms: his happy and relaxed expression suddenly acquires a lot of concentration to explain that, indeed, Tears of the Kingdom is really a toy that everyone can experiment with. And it’s curious because his case is not that of someone who was very clear, right from the start, that he wanted to create video games: “My family was a carpenter and when I was little I loved making crafts with pieces of wood,” he explains while illustrating with his hands everything he says. “Until I got to college, I was making toys that worked with ingenious mechanisms, but when I looked for a job, no one seemed interested in them.” Thanks to a friend’s suggestion, he entered a video game company where he was able to show Shigeru Miyamoto the puppets he had created. “She loved them,” he says with contained joy in his eyes.
Perhaps it was precisely this ability to play that convinced Miyamoto, the legendary designer and father of Super Mario, more than two decades ago, that Aonuma was the ideal person to whom to entrust the responsibility of watching over the Zelda saga. Under his leadership, and especially since 2017, games have been experiencing a particular phenomenon. It happened with Breath of the Wild and it is bound to happen with Tears of the Kingdom as well: people without much experience in video games feel attracted to live adventures in the Zelda universe.
Next to Aonuma sits the director of Tears of the Kingdom, Hidemaro Fujibayashi (Kyoto, 1972), who thoroughly meditates on everything he says. He confesses that he has felt the weight of responsibility for a development that has lasted six years and in which more than three hundred professionals have worked.
“We spent years discussing how we could improve what we did in Breath of the Wild, from the script to the gameplay, and we’ve worked with the goal of creating something that really wows players,” he says. In fact, it’s easy to understand the pressure felt by the game’s creators when you consider the tremendous success that Breath of the Wild achieved six years ago, the previous installment in the series, which revolutionized so-called open-world games, wowed public and critics and has sold more than 30 million units.
For his part, Fujibayashi came to video games from a Japanese tradition, the obakeyashi or haunted houses, a kind of installation similar to an escape room. As a child, he “wouldn’t stop designing them”. Thus, with a powerful gaming mindset and having gained more than twenty years of experience in Zelda, Fujibayashi realized something: “The members of the administrative staff at Nintendo hadn’t played many video games, but when we gave them a try of Breath of the Wild, we were surprised by their reactions and realized that they were playing imaginatively, having fun without being familiar with the game.” So, by making Nintendo’s accountants the testers, he came up with a must-have improvement for Tears of the Kingdom: Information sharing was required. The key was to promote that each player had a unique and different adventure and that, once played, he felt the need to express it and share it with other players.
And what can be shared for now? Without going into the delicate field of spoilers, we can state that “Tears of the Kingdom begins half a year after where Breath of the Wild left off” and that now the player’s mission is to unravel a mystery that occurred after a catastrophe that has put the kingdom of Hyrule – Nintendo’s Middle Earth – turned upside down. So much so that a set of strange floating islands have appeared in the sky and our hero now has new powers that allow him to experiment with the environment in never-before-seen ways. “The history of the game is not as dark as many media are highlighting,” Fujibayashi says; however, “the figure of the antagonist Ganondorf, who is very evil this time, perhaps gives it that tone,” says Aonuma.
A fear that has kept the community on edge since the game was announced in 2019 is how Nintendo Switch, which we remember is a console that went on sale six years ago, will be able to live up to such an ambitious production. “We started developing Breath of the Wild for an older machine, Wii U, and then it was ported to Switch,” Aonuma says, “whereas Tears of the Kingdom has been written from the beginning for Switch, which has allowed us to take advantage of better the potential of the console”. The producer exemplifies the latter by pointing out the possibility that players now have to “travel around the world, from heaven to earth, and vice versa, without any load times.”
This ability to move freely through the world adds to the sense of freedom and adventure of the latest installment, but Link’s new abilities are also tools that enhance player creativity. For Aonuma, the secret of the game lies precisely in the fact that “the user can think freely and find a solution by himself.” So the team threw themselves into coming up with lots of challenges and problems: “We created complex puzzles that can be solved in many different ways,” he adds. They are puzzles with ingenious, surreal solutions that often make the player smile and drive their journey through a thousand possible itineraries.
Indeed, the world is gigantic, almost without limits, but as Fujibayashi explains, the new player should not be afraid of getting lost: “There are many characters and mechanisms that can guide him”, although in the end he finds the solution himself. So, just like when they designed haunted houses or built puppets, with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Aonuma and Fujibayashi have devised an adventure in which the user feels like a creator at the same time.