E3: What Happened to Zelda? | GKick Network

June 9th, 2012 by Nickie Williams

Out of all the news I’ve posted about Nintendo console releases recently (Final Fantasy, Mario, Luigi)- for me there was two glaring omissions. No Pokemon and Zelda. I mean, come on. How can you NOT mention these two stalwart champions of the Nintendo platform? Pokemon aside, what happened to Zelda?

I mean, I know we’re not due another Zelda game on the 3DS console for a while as we’ve got really enough to be going on with. But with the Wii U coming out, you really would have thought that Zelda would have been up there with Mario at the top of the pile for a chance to be played. When I personally think of Nintendo games that need to be launched with consoles, I think Mario and Zelda, Pokemon and Metroid, Donkey Kong and Bomberman, Kirby and Phantasy Star. You get the drift. I know that the Wii U didn’t make the massive splash that it was hoping with it’s next-gen console, but when you think of Nintendo- you can’t ignore Shigeru Miyamoto who’s also known as that bloke who created Mario and Zelda.

So what does he have to say about the absence of Zelda at this year’s E3? Oh he was there, in his usual flamboyant way with his hilarious t-shirts. I mean, to me that man is as much of a legend as say Chris Metzen from Blizzard. Shigeru was there to tout his other big franchise creation though, Pikmin. Pikmin 3 is one of the titles being released as a new release for the Wii U, HD graphics and all. So why all this work on a non-Zelda game? Surely there has to be some kind of a reason? According to Shigeru, Pikmin 3 is being released for the Wii U instead of the Wii because of the processing power. It’s a lot more graphically intense and it runs far better on the new console. It’s been in development for about two years and it’s finally ready for a beta testing. Zelda on the other hand, is sadly not.

Last year’s E3 saw demos of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and most people were utterly blown away by the quality of the graphics on the new next-gen HD Wii U. But according to Shigeru, it’s still not ready for prime time. They want a multiplayer version of Zelda, which to me sounds pretty damned cool. Here’s what Shigeru Miyamoto said:

“But one thing that’s interesting is we’re seeing how the way that tastes are broadening in video games and you have some people who prefer more casual experiences, and you have some people who prefer sort of those more in-depth experiences. Obviously, as a company that’s been making games for a very long time, we tend to be more on the deeper, longer game side of things. But really what we continue to ask ourselves as we have over the years is, “What is the most important element of Zelda if we were to try to make a Zelda game that a lot of people can play?” So we have a number of different experiments going on, and [when] we decide that we’ve found the right one of those to really help bring Zelda to a very big audience, then we’ll be happy to announce it.”

With the Wii release of the last LoZ game, Skyward Sword; it was like a typical Zelda game with the controller becoming your weapons and it pretty much turned the player into Zelda incarnate. But players are said to have become bored with the game about half way through when they just decided to stop playing. It also had logistical issues for those players that were unable to swing a weapon. So the motion-controller idea of Zelda is being kept on a back shelf by Miyamoto and is hoping to improve and enhance it for the Wii U game.