The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time news, direct from the production area! The Zelda team chosen by Shigeru Miyamoto created Zelda 64 with surprising stubbornness! One part of that stubbornness was to do a stubborn interview. We’ll pass on a small part of that interview from the top of 1101’s nearby tree.

(1-11) Looks Like the Animation is Incredible in This Zelda (Part 3)

Naoki Mori (Cinema Scene Director): In the Legend of Zelda series, the protagonist has never spoken. This new game has inherited the tradition from the Super Famicom era. “This is a game, not a movie!” has always been Nintendo’s slogan, and this time is no different. But saying that, if you add up the time it takes to watch all the movies in Ocarina of Time, the total comes out to be more than 1 and 1/2 hours! The cutscenes are all short, but it adds up.

There are places in the game where you meet Princess Zelda. This is when a lot of special conditions come into play, and we had to program that accordingly. We had to toss out a lot of requests that just weren’t possible and make compromises. If you look at the cutscene we were able to make, long cuts were made to that, and Zelda, of course, remains expressionless.

Then the monitor started spitting out a mountain of errors, saying things like “I don’t feel like working for this princess!” That programmer was a very busy man, but when we interrupted him to ask “Can you somehow put this in, please?” he was able to do the textures and animations and scene cuts and so on. So I really want you to see the “Meeting Zelda” cutscene.

I was also in charge of synchronizing Link playing the Ocarina with the music. Basically my favorite place was the fire dungeon, so I think that’s the place where the music and cutscene synchronizes best. *laughs* I want you to see that, too.

Zelda’s ending reminds me of Star Wars. It also sort of references Dark Crystal. More than figuring out where the scene cuts should be, we were worrying about how to project that atmosphere.

I definitely watch anime a lot. So much so that I’m called Captain Anime. *laughs* Anime I consider interesting I show people with reckless abandon. “This is great!” I say. Recently I’ve been enjoying “Perfect Blue” which is a psycho thriller. It’s not because we used it as a reference for the games, but the transitions of cutscenes were interesting.

The scene cuts are connected to Link’s movements. It was interesting to watch that. In my time, it’s been my experience that things like animation and special effects can’t be separated.

In Zelda our goal was to clear everything up by making small cuts here and there. As for the information volume of the cartridge, of course it’s different from a CD-ROM game. CD-ROMs have a lot more volume. I admit that, you’re right.

We did have a storyboard. Well, we had one, but I wonder about it. *laughs* It’s easy to draw it.

“(1-11) Looks Like the Animation is Incredible in This Zelda (Part 3)” has ended. The interview continues from here, so please check back for updates!

1998-12-6-SUN