Hidemaro Fujibayashi

Director, The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild

You’ve worked at Capcom, as well as Nintendo – even if you were working on Nintendo IP while at Capcom, you’re not quite a ‘lifer’. What makes Nintendo different from other game companies? As far as I’m concerned, it’s that all staff – whether they’re programmers, artists, sound designers or whoever – go beyond the simple boundaries of their area of responsibility and suggest concrete ideas to each other to make a game more interesting. It’s like everyone is a game planner! This was my first surprise when I moved to Nintendo. Which member of senior Nintendo staff have you worked most closely with, and what is the most valuable thing you learned from them? I’ve worked with many staff more senior than me, and what I can say about all of them is that their attitude towards development is to keep striving to make a game interesting right until the very end. Of course, there are limits on the length of development, but even at a stage when normally it would be very challenging to make a change to the game’s design, they’d give a compelling reason and show with passion why the change is needed, and how it would improve the game. Their logic and enthusiasm passes on to the staff handling the change who then set about making the improvement. I’ve seen it countless times now where a game has dramatically improved like this, and it’s been a valuable lesson for me. Breath Of The Wild was a challenging project – a vast, seamless world built across two generations of console hardware. What was the biggest challenge you faced during development, and how did you surmount it? Of the games in the Zelda franchise, BOTW was one such title where the development included a lot of first attempts at things. Because of that, there were a lot of difficulties we faced, such as having to come up with new mechanics, ideas, and even a new flow for the game itself.

When I think about what the biggest issue was, it was probably sharing information with the roughly 300 staff involved on the project. With there being so many challenges we were facing for the first time, we needed everyone to be working with the same understanding of the exact specifications for the game, and the point of the gameplay we were aiming for. During development, I talked a lot with the staff and made a point of having very close communication with them. Similarly, which element – whether a system, a mechanic, a location or quest – of the game are you particularly, personally proud? I’d have to say it’s the climbing mechanic where players can climb wherever they like. Once we gave the protagonist, Link, this ability, we were able to create the core gameplay cycle for BOTW: discover something, go take a look, discover something, go take a look. Breath Of The Wild was, to put it mildly, very well received. Did you have the sense when you were making it that it was going to be something very special? How, in that respect, did making Breath

Of The Wild feel different from previous games you’ve made? It was one title where there were certainly a lot of new challenges, but during development we could gradually start to feel people’s positive reactions to it. Midway through development, we had the chance to get several pairs of people who don’t usually play games to do a monitor test for us. In all the pairs, we found that both the person playing and the person watching next to them were enjoying talking with each other as they made their way through the game. I’ve seen similar reactions during development of Zelda titles I’ve been involved in before now, but the response to this monitor test went well beyond any of them. I remember this was really encouraging as we developed the game. How close an eye have you been keeping on the crazy things people are getting up to in Breath Of

The Wild? Have you seen many things you never thought possible, or that no one would be crazy enough to try? The different ways that people are playing is a talking point among the staff here.

One way I personally found interesting is a method for defeating a Hinox with a Cucco. It would be a bit of a spoiler to go into details though so I won’t say more here!

We designed the game to have multiple ways to solve puzzles and defeat enemies, and I’m really happy that people are coming up with these sorts of unique challenges or ideas. Breath Of The Wild is radically different from other Zelda games, particularly some of the more recent entries. How much resistance, if any, was there

against the approach you took in challenging some of the series’ long-held traditions? When we start development on a new title for the Zelda series, we always set out to take on a new challenge no matter what the title is. So even with BOTW there was very little push-back. If anything, there were a lot of opinions from the staff on which direction we should take to make the game most fun, with regard to the new gameplay and mechanics that had been proposed. I remember my days being swamped working to select the best ideas from among the many opinions. Now the open-air structure has proven so successful for the series, can Zelda ever head back indoors? Or do you have ideas for how the linear, dungeonfocused structure could be similarly reinvented? With BOTW we presented an idea for new gameplay that you see now, but there are a lot of systems and ideas that we came up with during development that we couldn’t implement in BOTW. So, I don’t doubt that we will be considering all sorts of game styles in the future too. Creators are never fully satisfied with their finished works. Looking back on the game now, what do you wish you could have done differently? In my case, there’s been nothing I’ve regretted about how any of the titles I’ve worked on have gone. The same is true of BOTW. Together with the rest of the staff, we pour our best in that moment into our games, and so I honestly do not have anything that I’d like to change.

However, there have been a lot of times after we’ve just finished the mastering of a game where I’ve thought up even more interesting gameplay we could achieve with the mechanics already implemented, and have wanted to add those ideas in too. In this regard, you’ll find some of these ideas included in DLC Pack 1, The Master Trials, which is out now, and in Pack 2, The Champions’ Ballad, which is coming this winter. I hope you’ll try and experience them yourself!

“When we start development on a new title for the Zelda series, we always set out to take on a new challenge”