The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Retrospective – Episode 3 (Gameplay / Dungeons)

Today, Nintendo uploaded the third episode of a video series called The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Retrospective. It looks back at the development of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on GameCube and Wii. In this third episode, the following developers get to say something about the gameplay and the dungeons:

• Eiji Aonuma
• Yoshiyuki Oyama (Enemy Design)
• Koji Kitagawa (Dungeon Design)

First, Koji Kitagawa explains that since they went with a more realistic art style for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, they wanted to make the fields and the dungeon bigger. It was actually one of the concepts of the game: a bigger scale, and a more impactful world.

Eiji Aonuma then goes and explains that in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, he designed all the dungeons by himself. It wasn’t the case for Twilight Princess, where he had other developers take care of that. He reveals that each dungeon has specific item(s), but incorporating them into the dungeon’s structure is actually pretty hard.

Take the Iron Boots for example. They wanted them to be magnetic but… what do you do with that? They thought the boots could stick to walls and ceilings, and designed the Gorons’ mine to take advantage of that. This dungeon has a pretty open design, which is quite different from previous dungeons in the Zelda series.

The City in the Sky is one of the last dungeons of the game, and Koji Kitagawa reveals that they created it because they wanted to have a city floating in the sky. After that, they thought that it would be pretty cool to turn the city into an actual dungeon.

Next, Eiji Aonuma talks a bit about one of the items of the game: the Spinner. It’s the item they were worried about the most, because they were not quite sure how to use it. That being said, they still went ahead and created it anyway. At one point, they had a rather neat idea: use the Spinner to solve puzzles (by rotating cogs).

Yoshiyuki Oyama also has something to say about the Spinner, because of Stallord (the enemy he remembers the most). It’s the boss of Arbiter’s Ground (the dungeon in the desert), and they began working on it before the Spinner was finalised. As you can imagine, they had to constantly change the boss battle to take the item into account, and it took a while to finalise the battle.

As for Koji Kitagawa, it’s Argorok (boss of the City in the Sky) that he talks about in the video. During this battle, you have to use the Double Clawshot to get on the dragon’s back, and make it fall to the ground.

Finally, Eiji Aonuma talks about the underwater sections of the game. To the surprise of no one, he’s always found working on underwater sections tricky. In Twilight Princess, the team had trouble combining controls for swimming and walking underwater.

Even after the game was released, Aonuma wasn’t completely satisfied with how those controls turned out, so it was one of the elements he wanted to fix first in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD. After some trial and error, they finally managed to make the controls more comfortable. Want more underwater sections in the Zelda series? It’s actually a theme Aonuma would like to explore further in the future!

Here’s the video:

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD (Wii U) comes out on March 4th in Europe and North America, and March 10th in Japan.

Source: Nintendo