E02 | Twilight Princess
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What if I told you that Breath of the Wild wouldn’t exist without Twilight Princess? Or that Zelda as a whole may not exist today without it? For the uninitiated, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess may be among the most important games Nintendo has ever developed, for a variety of reasons:
- It was the game that saved the Zelda series from being shelved after the poor reception of The Wind Waker in the west and the onset of “gamer drift” in Japan. (Gamer drift was a term used by Nintendo to refer to the decline of the Japanese video game market.)
- It played a key role in Nintendo better understanding their western audience, and was also the game that helped Nintendo understand what it takes to develop a large-scale, big-budget, narrative-heavy title from a time, resource, and management standpoint.
- Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma himself has stated that Breath of the Wild wouldn’t exist without Twilight Princess having come first, as a lot of their ideas in BOTW were originally intended for TP.
The Context:
Late 2003. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has not sold to expectations. The game has proven unpopular with western audiences due to its super-deformed style, and has not sold especially well in Japan, either. Development of the game needed to be sped up in order to release on time, resulting in cut content and a lack of polish. Furthermore, by Nintendo’s own admission, The Wind Waker isn’t a particularly novel product, being structured largely after Ocarina of Time but with a visual style that proved to be less popular than that of its two predecessors. In short, it is a game that took away a major element of the franchise that the market was acclimated to—especially after the Gamecube tech demo teaser that preceded it—and didn’t add enough other appealing elements that sufficiently made up for the shift in visual style.
Nintendo as a whole has seen a difficult 8 years amidst stiff competition from the PS1 and PS2, and the shortcomings of the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube. Under these circumstances, Shigeru Miyamoto believes that spending a large amount of resources on developing large-scale games is not the way Nintendo should approach game development, and the past few years have been spent experimenting with alternative approaches to Zelda games, in the hopes of chancing upon a more novel idea. Ideas such as multiplayer (Four Swords) and GBA-to-Gamecube connectivity (Four Swords Adventures) have been at the forefront of these experiments over the past two years, but aren’t proving particularly popular. Zelda is suffering from an identity crisis and the series is under the very real threat of being shelved if the next game can’t turn its fortunes around.
At this point, Nintendo is working on a sequel to The Wind Waker, using a similar visual style to that game. However, having worked on a number of Zelda titles by this point and having been in touch with Nintendo of America to better understand the series’ audience, producer Eiji Aonuma believes that this isn’t a wise course of action. Aonuma has correctly pinpointed that Zelda’s western audience—its largest audience by far—largely wants three things out of a Zelda game, first and foremost:
- A cooler-looking, and more realistically-proportioned Link
- A convincing fantasy backdrop similar to movies like Lord of the Rings
- The ability to explore a large world on horseback
Aonuma discusses the matter with Miyamoto and convinces him that Nintendo needs to develop a more “realistic” Zelda game to bring its western audience back on board. Miyamoto is skeptical, but trusts Aonuma’s instincts and the Wind Waker 2 project is rebooted into what would become Twilight Princess. By this point, Wind Waker 2 has already fallen into a rut, and the reboot provides the development team with a much-needed burst of enthusiasm.
From Development to Launch:
During the development of Twilight Princess, the Zelda team encounters a large number of well-documented hurdles, ranging from the team having far too many ideas that couldn’t all realistically be incorporated within a reasonable timeframe, to the project simply being too large to manage. Twilight Princess quickly balloons out of control, and a number of the ideas that the team has need to be scaled back or abandoned entirely. To help get the project back on track, Aonuma steps in as director, while Miyamoto steps in as producer. And even then, there are creative disagreements—Aonuma wants the game to begin with a cold open with Link already in wolf form, whilst Miyamoto vetoes the idea and suggests that the team begin with a tutorial in Ordon Village instead, to help the player get acclimated to all the different mechanics that would be featured in the game.
However, certain key ideas are preserved, and would contribute not only to Twilight Princess’s appeal, but also the way Nintendo would approach future Zelda games. Among these is the idea of more fluid world design, with areas of the overworld featuring dungeon-like gameplay, and the entrances to the actual dungeons themselves being better integrated into the world. A great deal of attention is also lavished upon Link and his horse, with character designer Keisuke Nishimori going horse-riding himself to better understand how horses in the game should behave. Finally, Twilight Princess also features a fairly large world to explore on horseback, with a number of little nooks and crannies to investigate, giving the entire game a moody sense of adventure and world-building.
Along the way, Twilight Princess is also made compatible with Nintendo’s upcoming Wii console, and motion controls are created for sword fighting, as well as aiming with the bow and arrow. While the Wii port complicates the game’s development cycle even further, it goes on to play a large role in its marketing campaign and subsequent success.
We've all seen this trailer and the reaction to it at the time.
Aonuma and a member of Nintendo's U.S. team worked on it together.
Success & Legacy:
Aonuma’s hunch pays off, and when Twilight Princess is eventually released in 2006, it is met with both acclaim and success. Buoyed by its more “realistic” (and I use that term loosely) design, as well as the success of the Wii, Twilight Princess goes on to sell over 8.85 million units over the next several years, making it the second-best-selling Zelda game of all time. The year after its release, it also receives an award for “Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development” from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.
In a GDC keynote following its release, Aonuma reveals: "When it was announced with a surprise trailer at the 2004 E3, it received a standing ovation from the media audience. This was a very exciting moment for us, but we were still in the very early stages of converting the game into something more realistic. We knew that we had to create a Zelda game that would live up to the expectations of fans in North America, and that if we didn’t, it could mean the end of the franchise."
The game’s influence doesn’t stop there. Twilight Princess’s Link goes on to become the Zelda brand’s mascot for a number of years to follow, even after the release of 2011’s The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Twilight Princess’s Link is the face of Zelda across Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Smash Bros. for 3DS and Wii U, the inspiration behind Link’s design in Hyrule Warriors, and also the face of the long-running and incredibly successful Twilight Princess manga by Akira Himekawa. (Meanwhile, Twilight Princess itself has received two spin-off games in Link’s Crossbow Training and Twilight Princess Picross.)
Twilight Princess’s more obvious legacy is the fact that Breath of the Wild takes a number of cues from it in terms of both visual design and world design. Twilight Princess’s approach to Link with a heavy focus on realistic proportions and detailed animations carries over to BOTW, as does the idea of the world being built to-scale and explorable on horseback. This more “realistic” approach has been acknowledged by members of the Zelda team as the one audiences find most appealing for third-person Zelda games, and one that wouldn’t have come about without Twilight Princess.
In fact, when the time came to work on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the actual in-game map of Twilight Princess was used to help prototype BOTW’s seamless open world from a technological standpoint. The Zelda team placed the entirety of the Twilight Princess map within the BOTW engine to figure out how to create a seamless environment using the Wii U hardware. During prototyping, the TP map occupied the upper-left corner of the world, with the remainder of the world being based on the layout of Kyoto.
Regarding the design of Breath of the Wild, Aonuma would state: "I'm working on a new Legend of Zelda game now. One thing I've realized as I've been working on it is that a lot of the things I want to do with this new 'Zelda' game are things I thought of while making Twilight Princess. I can't talk specifics, but to me, Twilight Princess was a starting point, making it possible to do what I'm doing now."
Note: A great deal of time and effort has gone into researching these facts, all of which I can personally guarantee are accurate (or as close to accurate as we will ever possibly get using information in the public domain). All of the information cited above is from a dissertation/eBook/Wiki entry I wrote on the development history of the Zelda series, researched and compiled over a period of 4 years, using hundreds of developer interviews spanning several different languages, behind-the-scenes features, and GDC keynotes. If you’d like a better understanding of Zelda dev history, you can read it here.
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