When you think about video games that have a deep story, or at least ones that have a lore about them that must be developed, you would think that those stories come first in the game design process. However, that’s not always the case, and The Legend of Zelda is one such example of that. Eiji Aonuma, who has been a producer of Zelda for a long time, revealed in a new interview with the Washington Post that when he’s creating titles, he focuses on the gameplay first and then worries about the story:
“I’ve never really made a game where you think of the story first and then go into gameplay. First when you think of the gameplay, what you’re trying to think of after that is how you can get players to understand that gameplay. The story becomes used as a vessel because it has a beginning and end, and the player moves through it.”
Not what you were expecting, right? Yet, we know that Aonuma and the team at Grezzo did this exact thing for The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom. They didn’t think that Link using Echoes as a gameplay mechanic would work with players, so they pulled a swap and made Zelda the protagonist! Then, they worked a story around her so that it would make sense that she was the protagonist. Oh, and Aonuma says that he’s not changing his methods of development:
“I think it would actually be kind of difficult to do the reverse and start with the story, then try to match the gameplay mechanics to that.”
