Eiji Aonuma

Wouldn't be here without you playing these games.

Speaking of awards, Eiji Aonuma.

who is produced on Legend of Zelda series, directed some games, stuff like that.

But he is the Zelda man basically now or has been for a while.

He was honored by France for his contributions to video games.

I'm going to read this from my Nintendo news also.

The Legend of Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma is now the second Nintendo employee to receive Francis Cheval...

How do you say this? Because it's a French word.

No offense.

Aonuma-san, first Zelda game that he was working on was the original Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 64.

And now you're like, wow, 40 years later, what an incredible...

How many?

... foundation and, and gave everybody the wrong first impression.

'Cause even, even over the course of that Nintendo Direct, going from that moment to the sizzle they had at the end where they showed a lot of, like, adult Link doing adult Link stuff around Hyrule, I was like, "Oh, wait, this looks awesome." Like, why did, why did I just watch Aonuma run around in Kokiri Forest for 20 minutes when you could've been showing me this the whole time? And then that new trailer I felt very similarly, was like, "Yeah, this looks sick." Like, this looks like exactly what I would want out of this.

So I dunno.

I, I really think it was just, like, a weird, a weird decision with that Nintendo Direct-

What do you think is the next Zelda game? Like, what do you think is gonna be? Uh, you think it's gonna be one of these narrative games and they're, they're prepping? You think this is, this is a good stepping into that, that water and see if people still love that?

I'm trying to find some quotes that I have here straight from Eiji Aonuma.

Mm.

By the way, yeah, [laughs] I'll get, I'll come back to that.

It's designed to look like an in-universe document, like you found it, not like Nintendo wrote it.

So there's this whole question of how does the presentation shape what authority it actually has? And then Eiji Aonuma, who's been overseeing this timeline publicly, says the thing is flexible almost the moment it lands.

Which is, wait, flexible how? Flexible meaning it can be revised, or flexible meaning it was never quite firm.

That is exactly the tension.

If it were genuine blueprint, you'd expect it to surface in sequels, in spin-off briefs, in something.

So the document existing doesn't prove it was directing anything.

Exactly, and authority over that document was concentrated in Aonuma's producer role, not distributed among the original game designers.

The people who made the early games weren't working from it.

I wish this would've been a bit before 'cause I already felt like the child part was a bit light.

But th- this is, this is, again, where like I think Aonuma really shines, and it's, it's actually less [laughs] when he's writing the story about Ocarina of Time, and using that scenario to write different stories in the world.

Yeah, I, uh, I'm actually much more interested to [laughs] see what his own Zelda adventure would look like, and not him adapting something that was already pre-made.

Which is funny 'cause I think you'll kinda get a taste of that with Majora's Mask.