Did you get excited when you read the title of this article? I know I did. Of course, this isn’t written in stone, but according to an interview between Wired.com and the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto, it is possible that Retro Studios could be working on the newest installment in the Legend of Zelda franchise. I, personally, am just about to die from happiness. For those of you who are unaware, Retro Studios was responsible for the amazing Metroid Prime games (read: Metroid Prime: Hunters and Pinball were by created someone else), which are some of my favorite games of all time. Retro is also responsible for Donkey Kong Returns, a well-received Wii game that was a return to DK’s vine-swinging roots. Retro also helped out with some of the designs for Mario Kart 7. Retro Studios is one of my favorite developers at the moment, and, frankly, my dream job would be to work for them.
I think that giving The Legend of Zelda series to Retro Studios would be a great idea; they know what they’re doing. Plus, I feel that Skyward Sword wasn’t as fresh as I hoped it would be. What they did to the Metroid series with Metroid Prime was brilliant, and I would love to see them craft the green-clad hero’s newest adventure. In my opinion, Retro is the most competent Western developer suited for the job. Here’s an excerpt from Wired.com’s interview, so you can see for yourself:
Wired.com: It’s come out since Mario Kart 7 came out, there have been some articles about how Retro Studios was very deeply involved in the making of this game, and it’s considered a landmark for the series because you had this collaboration between EAD and Retro. And I’m curious as to whether you think that this would be an interesting model for more games, like a Mario platformer or a Zelda game, to have a Western team and a Japanese team working in close concert to produce a game like that.
Miyamoto: First of all, let me talk a little bit more in detail about how we collaborated with Retro Studios this time. Of course, they were taking care of the game designing aspect. Specifically, they were taking care of the design of the courses and the artwork about that. But when it comes to the gameplay and the control mechanism itself, that’s being taken care of by EAD once again.
People often say that videogames made by Western developers are somehow different in terms of taste for the players, in comparison with Japanese games. I think that means that the Western developers and Japanese developers, they are good at different fields. And that resulted in a different taste in [their games]. Mario Kart, I believe, was good in order to express that kind of different taste because we have many kinds of different courses for the Mario karts to run and race around. So for each of the different courses, we could identify: Retro is supposed to take care of this course, and EAD is going to do that, and such and such. Then, we were able to join forces in order to realize a variety of different courses, a variety of different tastes. I think that’s one reason how it worked out well between a Japanese development team and a Western development team.
As you know, we have already collaborated with Retro for the Metroid Prime series in the past. And I think when we talk about any other franchise, Zelda might be a possible franchise for that collaboration.
So, what do you think of this possibility? Does it make your mouth water? Or does it leave a sour taste in your mouth? Sound off in the comment section below.
Source: Wired.com
