How would you compare that to the way other cinematic video games are done? What style is better for getting the story across? WN: So after Link's Awakening, was your work mostly concentrated on writing for the games themselves? Also, in a broader sense, Nintendo's games don't usually pursue big, dramatic stories. YK: You're right, EAD doesn't tend to focus on the big story in most of their games. But I was the one coming up with scenarios, just on my own, ever since the time of Link's Awakening. But even at that time, I felt like I came up with this entire scenario and a backstory for Link, but nobody really seemed to care. They were always saying, let's not try to push the story forward too much. So I would sort of try to find sneaky ways to get it in without them noticing too much. For example, I always liked the idea of you coming upon another character and hearing little bits of conversation that slowly begin to reveal different parts of the story. And that was the way that I tried to work on Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. A lot of the EAD games that do seem to have a lot of story, a lot of that came from my influence. But those are aspects of the games that Miyamoto wasn't nearly as fond of and occasionally didn't like. WN: I always thought it was interesting that Miyamoto started off with Donkey Kong, pushing the idea of story in video games, makes this revolutionary game in which you have for the first time this narrative, this main character on a quest. And then immediately after Donkey Kong, he immediately pulls back from that, doesn't want to do it anymore, just wants to concentrate on gameplay. And that seems to have set the tone for so much of EAD's content for the last three decades. YK: When you think about the whole "save the princess" storyline of games being one of Miyamoto's inventions, I don't think of that as a story so much as it is a goal. There's not necessarily a buildup and a resolution of a deeper kind, like you'd find in a novel. It's just a situation that motivates the players. Lacking that kind of detailed nuance, that doesn't mean I'm not interested in a story at all. It's just that as a designer, my priorities are a little different. I tend to convey emotion in slightly different ways rather than just rely on the most obvious kind of narrative that we would think of when we think of storylines.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |