Eiji Aonuma

Hello, everyone.

I'm Eiji Aonuma, producer of The Legend of Zelda series.

New features will include real-time vocal humming or instrument input to play in-game melodies on the ocarina.

Now, I want to introduce the most important item in this game.

And we'll start off, of course, with in today's Legend of Zelda 40th Anniversary Direct Presentation, Nintendo marked four decades of Hyrule Heroics with a treasure trove of announcements for new products and events starting this year and continuing into 2027.

Series producer Eiji Aonuma showed the first gameplay of the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time game for the Nintendo Switch 2 system and revealed that the title will launch on November 5th.

Holy smokes, Sam.

It's right around the corner.

We got Ocarina of Time.

And Aonuma came up, talked about the history of Ocarina of Time, and then started getting into some of the gameplay and the camera controls and all of the changes to it.

So I wanted to ask you guys out the gate, because I know there's been a lot of discussion about this online.

How do you feel about the art direction and the overall graphical presentation for this one when he jumped right into the game?

Yeah, it's interesting.

So Eiji Aonuma, who was the producer of the series, he joined the Zelda team with Ocarina of Time.

Okay.

He got started with the company with Nintendo as an artist.

Like the developers, when they talk about it, they say that when they were very first building the game, they did have a jump button.

And it's kind of somewhat disputed as to how it changed to an auto jump.

Like, both Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma claim credit for it.

Okay.

Some fucking footage.

Eiji Aonuma shows up, and he does...

It did kind of make me feel a little nostalgia about, you know, Breath of the Wild, when he'd just kind of sit there and play the game for us and just show it to us, like, way back when, you know? Yeah.

The horse knows what it's

I still wasn't prepared.

I think like a lot of people, when it went from Aonuma presenting to just Link studying Kokiri Forest, I, like a lot of people, sort of recoiled.

Like, hey.

Um, and I've had to really think about it over the course of watching that trailer.

And they showed the logo, which was very nice, and all that kind of stuff, and they said this will run through starting now till the end of the year, of course, or till next year around this time.

And, um, then we just kind of went into straight Ocarina of Time remake with, uh, Aonuma.

He came out and actually played the game.

We saw him, like, you know, playing it.

Uh, okay.

Classic controller.

[laughs] So we saw the part with, uh, Aonuma playing the game.

He showed off the game.

started having a big management role around Skyward Sword and then was the primary producer for both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

And so the understanding among people who kind of like read the organizational tea leaves of Nintendo is that Fujibayashi is prepped to succeed Eiji Aonuma as the head honcho over Zelda in the coming months, years, whatever.

So it was good to see him as well.

But so we moved from the Zelda Symphony straight into the into the museum.

And then they just faded to the same title.

And we'll have more to show at a later date.

And I was like, wait, what? That was it? And then I think Eiji Aonuma or I think it was Aonuma comes back on screen or was it Miyamoto? I think that was Miyamoto.

Yeah.