‘The Grass is Greener:’ Tears of the Kingdom Developers Look Back While Responding to Classic Fans

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have frequently been hailed as the refresh the series needed, but there remains a contingent of fans who still prefer the old ways. They’re the fans who have fond memories of Wind Waker and Ocarina of Time, and wouldn’t mind returning to the days of intricate, if relatively linear, experiences.

“Well, I do think we as people have a tendency to want the thing that we don’t currently have, and there’s a bit of a grass is greener mentality,” said producer Eiji Aonuma, who has been with the Zelda series since it first went to 3D on the Nintendo 64.

Aonuma and his colleague, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, were on hand for The Game Awards 2023, where Tears of the Kingdom won the prize for Best Action-Adventure Game. In a new interview with IGN, they reflected on it success, talked about why they didn’t put much stock in the chronology of the series, and explained how they came up with some of its biggest twists.

Aonuma in particular isn’t shy about sharing his perspective on how he thinks games — and the series — have evolved.

“It’s interesting when I hear people say [they prefer the old entries] because I am wondering, ‘Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you’re more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?’ But I do understand that desire that we have for nostalgia, and so I can also understand it from that aspect,” Aonuma says.

His comments are a useful window into where the series might go next, which has been a topic of debate among fans, especially with the Switch 2 seemingly on the horizon. Should the series continue along the path forged by Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom? Or should it return to its proverbial roots, like Link visiting The Great Deku Tree? And what about Zelda? Here’s what Aonuma and Fujibayashi had to say about the future of the series as they reflected on their work on Tears of the Kingdom.

SPOILER WARNING: This interview contains a major spoiler for Tears of the Kingdom. Read on at your own risk!

So it’s been several months now since Tears of the Kingdom’s release. Can you share your hindsight perspective? Anything you would change given the opportunity or ideas that you had to leave behind?

Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Director: So I’ll start by saying the game is built so that players can really use their imagination to create anything. And that kind of freedom and creativity really shows itself in social media, like YouTube… people uploading videos and watching that. Really, the first thing is just surprise, it’s beyond even the development team’s imagination of what kinds of things people created.

Eiji Aonuma, Producer: So in my past, when I was in college, one thing I did was work on creating puppets. And these were puppets that functioned by turning a crank of sorts to get them to move. And this was something that when we were working on the Legends of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I wasn’t able to do… But after the game came out, I saw that, oh my gosh, people created puppets like the ones I made in real life when I was in college, but with more complexity that I wasn’t able to do during development. And so I see that and I’m like, oh man, they kind of one-upped me in that regard.

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— スモグリ (@sumoguri2323) November 23, 2023

Do you have a favorite post-release moment from the community? One of the things that I loved seeing was, for example, someone created a Godzilla in Tears of the Kingdom. It was incredible.

Fujibayashi: Yeah, I actually saw that same footage recently. And initially I was like, this must be a different game. And then I read through it, I was like, oh, it’s the game we made. And it was certainly a surprise.

Aonuma: I’ve seen the same video, and in the video Link doesn’t appear in the camera or on the screen. So I’m wondering, what did they do with the camera? It almost does feel like a different game in that way. And I’m still kind of mystified by that.

Having finished Tears of the Kingdom recently, I’d love to talk a little bit about the ending. When did you decide that Zelda should become a dragon carrying the Master Sword?

Aonuma: I was just trying to recall when that was, but the fact that Zelda was going to turn into a dragon was something that we had decided very early on in the planning stage. And then the idea of having the Master Sword on the dragon probably immediately after that.

So if you were to consider the whole development process, from one to 10, I’d say the dragon decision was probably somewhere between one and two. And the decision to have the Master Sword on the dragon’s head was three to four, although we did know that the Master Sword should probably be on the dragon somewhere.

Fujibayashi: So this story has this great time paradox as a theme that goes through it. And so we were thinking, ‘Okay, well how can we use the Master Sword with that theme as the background and get the Master Sword into Link’s hands once he no longer has it?’ And I remember that we, at some point, stumbled onto the dragon being a way that we can deliver the Master Sword to Link in a kind of grand fashion.

Was it stressful thinking that players could discover the Master Sword in a lot of different ways? For example, just going to the dragon, or seeing the memory first. I used a guide to get there, but the design aspects and the storytelling seems very complicated to me.

Fujibayashi: We built the game so that it’s an enjoyable experience for the player. And we certainly spent a long time discussing this with some of the main contributors to the game, and really thinking about how we would build the game such that if someone were to, say, discover the dragon without having seen anything else, that we could maybe perhaps conceal it a little bit, make it a little bit mysterious.

There’s a lot of hard work in figuring out how to accomplish all of this. But this is all tied to this idea that there’s this certain sense of accomplishment and joy when you’re working hard towards something and you unravel this deep mystery. We want the player to be able to enjoy that and for us to be able to enjoy that as well. So in that sense, I would say it’s certainly a lot of work. It’s certainly a lot of hard work, but it wasn’t stressful…[I]n creating this game, we didn’t want to create a game where players can’t do something because we don’t want them to see it.

We wanted to create a game where people can discover in their own way, and that was a point that we made sure that we didn’t do.

Aonuma: So I am in complete agreement with what Mr. Fujibayashi said in that games where you need to follow a specific set of steps or complete tasks in a very set order are kind of the games of the past. Whereas currently the games of today are ones in which that can accept a player’s own decisions and give them the freedom to flexibly proceed through the game, and the game will allow for that. So I’m in complete agreement with that as our design philosophy, but as the producer, I do have to admit making games that way always carries with it additional development costs. And that is something I have to think about.

It’s interesting to hear you say that because one of the discussions that I’ve seen among Zelda fans is, “Gosh, I miss the more traditional linear Zelda of the past.” And I’m wondering, how do you feel about that given the direction of the series toward a very free-form, open-ended kind of design?

Aonuma: Well, I do think we as people have a tendency to want the thing that we don’t currently have, and there’s a bit of a grass is greener mentality. But I also think that with the freedom players have in the more recent games in the series…there still is a set path, it just happens to be the path that they chose. So I think that that is one thing I kind of like to remind myself about the current games that we’re making.

But also, it’s interesting when I hear people say those things because I am wondering, “Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you’re more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?” But I do understand that desire that we have for nostalgia, and so I can also understand it from that aspect.

Speaking personally, I really enjoyed Tears of the Kingdom’s design, and I think a lot of people were grateful for the much more intricate dungeons. I think why a lot of fans valued Ocarina of Time and games like that were the clever dungeons that felt like a very crafted, very deliberate experience. And with Breath of the Wild, especially initially, the dungeons felt quite a bit simpler by comparison…but I think there’s sort of a hunger for those very classic dungeons like the Water Temple and things like that.

Aonuma: That was kind of our intention with Tears of the Kingdom, as you mentioned, which was to put a bit more density or thoughtfulness into the design of the dungeons in the game. I mean, when we think of Breath of the Wild, one of our guiding principles was to rethink the conventions of the series, and that applied to our thinking about dungeons as well. So we kind of broke apart our previous assumptions about the way we’ve made dungeons so far with that game. And I think the result was simpler approach that you saw in dungeons in that game.

But then we did hear the desire from fans for a bit more of a designed dungeon, and that led to our approach to dungeons for Tears of the Kingdom. And so as we proceed, whenever we’re making a game, we look back at our past and then consider where we are now with the freedom that we give to the player in these games.

One of my favorite dungeons was the Wind Temple in which you climb steadily into a storm and eventually make your way into the actual dungeon, and then the boss. I was flying and diving onto it, and I don’t think I ever actually landed. It was a thrilling proof of Tears of the Kingdom’s sky theme, and it felt very connected to the world, and it felt far more elaborate compared to Breath of the Wild. I thought it was a really magnificent accomplishment. Tell me a little bit about making it.

Fujibayashi: So, first of all, I’m very happy that you liked that and that was your favorite. That makes me very, very happy. So because this is probably the first dungeon that players are going to encounter and experience, we wanted to make sure that this was representative of the gameplay experience of the entire game And as you mentioned, the idea was that to not land. And so we had been calling this the aerial battle, and within that aerial battle, thinking about how we would use arrows or like you said, dive and use your body to attack. We just really spend a lot of time thinking about what kinds of scenarios we could put in here that would make aerial battles feel good, feel right.

And like I mentioned, the idea of diving and using your body, or using bows and arrows against the big enemy, these were all new experiences… things that the player hadn’t been able to do at that time. And so what we took a lot of time and effort doing was making sure that on the player’s journey to that boss, that they learned the things that they needed to do to defeat this boss.

By being able to provide players with the slight obstacles that they can learn and grow on their path to that boss, they can have this grand experience. And again, that was a lot of hard work.

I want to talk a little bit about Zelda for a moment. I remember when the trailer first appeared, my first thought was, ‘Oh, now Zelda’s adventuring too. Maybe this is co-op, maybe Zelda will be playable.’ But of course, she had her own story in Tears of the Kingdom. What you think of the desire among fans for Zelda to have a bigger role, and to even be playable?

Aonuma: Yeah, it is interesting when you think about the name of the series, the Legend of Zelda, but Link is always the main character….Zelda has always been involved, and they have a relationship and their own rules in each of the games, but it is true that I think there’s always room for thinking about this type of thing and Zelda’s role. And there may be some sort of possibility for something like that in the future.

I think a lot of people are curious: are Link and Zelda in a romantic relationship in this game?

Aonuma: I will leave it to everyone’s imagination [whether Link and Zelda are in a relationship]. I don’t think that Zelda is a type of game where the development team says, “This is what Zelda is, this is what the story is, this is what the game is.” Everything that the development team wants to convey has already been placed into the game. And the rest is up to the player’s imagination, and their reflection on how they feel… what they’ve experienced in the game.”

When I was playing Tears of the Kingdom, I was struggling a little to connect Ganondorf to Calamity Ganon, to Breath of the Wild, to the rest of the series. And the way that I’ve come to understand Zelda is that it is a series of legends maybe being told. It’s myth, it’s stories. And so it doesn’t necessarily need to connect together. It feels like an oral tradition. And I’m wondering how that fits into your understanding of Zelda’s storytelling?

Aonuma: I think just as you say. This is a series that really lends itself well to each person playing, then thinking back and interpreting the story elements in their own way. We have these major players in each game, with Zelda, and Ganon, and Link, and they each surface and play their roles in potentially slightly different ways in each title.

But personally, I don’t like to put too much stock in the chronology of the series, because from the design perspective, that can kind of box us in and limit where we’re able to take the story as we continue making games in the series. And so I do think it’s something that is best for people to interpret on their own. And yeah, I was kind of agreeing with many of the things you said.

Talking about the actual development of Tears of the Kingdom, I’ve seen some comments that have said that Tears of the Kingdom’s quality is down to an established veteran team with relative security in a pretty chaotic games industry. And I’m wondering, do you agree with that sentiment?

Fujibayashi: Yeah, I think there’s obviously a core staff that drives all of this… that have a strong understanding and a deep connection not just with Zelda, but game creation in general. And people in our position say we have exposure because we are representing the team, but it’s really, there are programmers that program the game; there are designers that actually draw the content in there; there’s sound engineers that create some of the music, planners that design the story. So there are really highly skilled people that create and make this team within those categories, and they’re highly skilled staff… they draw on this deep knowledge and understanding of what Zelda is. And it’s almost a chemical reaction that resulted in the creation and production of this game.

Aonuma: As you said, it is true that the core members of the development team and having a strong core is important, but we would be remiss to not mention that there were many young members of the team that contributed in many ways as well. And I think their presence on the team was just as important in us being able to realize the vision for this game that we had. But it takes time for us to have a cohesive understanding together among the veteran members and these newer members of the team on what the Legend of Zelda is… what it is to make the game that we’re making together. And so it also means that having a team with that type of breakdown can mean additional time in creating a game. But thankfully we had that time.

Yeah, it’s quite unusual to have that kind of space and time to craft the game that you want to make.

Aonuma: Yeah, and I’m really thankful for that time and space that this company that we’re making games with is able to give us.

At what points did you feel like you ran up against the Switch’s technical limitations, and how did you overcome them to create this, frankly, astonishing technical achievement on the Nintendo Switch?

Fujibayashi: Well, as you’re aware, one of the key features to this game is the ability to travel seamlessly from between the different layers of the world that we’ve made. So from traveling all the way from the sky down to the surface, and then beyond that into the depths below. And this was something that, I think, that type of thing, that type of movement, was something I had previously envisioned or thought it would be very great to achieve, but knew that this was something on previous hardware that was likely impossible. But when I knew we were going to take that on as a challenge, I thought, we’d really be able to do this without loading. I mean, there is some loading that occurs as you’re doing it, but it’s hidden in the background. And when I saw we were able to really pull off that seamless travel between the layers of the world, I thought, wow, the team we have working on this are really, really something special. We’ve got some special people working on this.

Aonuma-san, after Skyward Sword’s launch, you said you were growing tired of the Zelda formula and you wanted to change it. You also said you continued returning so that you could retire with no regrets. Following the success of both the Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, do you feel like you’ve achieved your goal to leave your mark on Zelda? Or do you still have unfinished business with the franchise?

Aonuma: Wow, did I really say that? I don’t remember clearly all the things I said in the past, but I’ll trust you on that…So in creating Zelda, there are times when you’re doing the same thing in the same field over and over. There are times where you wonder, am I going to be doing this over and over, how am I going to continue doing this?

Yeah, and at times like that, I think it is really good to be surrounded by a staff like Mr. Fujibayashi and the team that we have who will… they can make all sorts of suggestions and suggest new types of things that I think we can carry forward in the series as we go. And that is one of the things that happened this time as well with Tears of the Kingdom. Thinking back on the past, I worked as a director in the series, and that was a difficult role; where it’s on you to determine what will be the main features; what direction to take the game.

Now I’m in the role of a producer, so those difficult decisions may be with the rest of the team now, but I’m really looking forward to going forward and being with them… working with them together… as we think about the future of the series in my role as a producer. And so, yes, I do think there is still a lot of fun for us to be had with the series as we go forward.

Blogroll photo credit: Kat Bailey / IGN.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.