2023-05-15 19:00:58
“Zelda is a reference and even a bible” for developers, says Katsuhiko Hayashi. (Photo: 123RF)
Tokyo — In nearly forty years of existence, “Zelda”, Nintendo’s series of action-adventure video games, including a new episode, available since Friday, has influenced a large number of creators with its mechanics and its separate universe. Here are some examples:
Inspiration for creators
“Zelda is a reference and even a bible” for developers, says Katsuhiko Hayashi, editor-in-chief of the Japanese specialist magazine Famitsu.
“A lot of games have sought to take elements from influential titles like + DOOM +, + Metroid + or + Metal Gear Solid +,” reminds AFP Mark Brown, who analyzes game design on his YouTube channel “Game Maker’s Toolkit”.
But ‘Zelda’, he says, ‘has always been different: the developers have often been inspired by a more general feel which they describe as exploration, adventure, mystery, surprise and progression’ of the hero.
Among the creators who have “confessed their love for the series and created games inspired by their experience”, he cites Hideki Kamiya (“Okami”), Hidetaka Miyazaki (“Dark Souls”) or Fumito Ueda (“Ico”). “More recently, we have also seen independent developers who loved Zelda as children try to capture these sensations in their creations”, such as “Fez” or “Tunic”.
An “open world” pioneer
From “Grand Theft Auto” (“GTA”) to “Skyrim”, “open world” games, which allow you to move freely and interact at will in a huge world, are now legion.
This element was already present in the first “Zelda” in 1986, explains Kiyoshi Tane, author specializing in the history of video games: “the scale of the game was enormous at a time when most games were completed in an hour or so. two. The map was designed with a real focus on exploration, and from that perspective, it was kind of a pioneer of what open-world games would become.”
The latest episode of the series — “Breath of the Wild,” released in 2017 — “came at a time when people were getting tired of the open world” and helped reinvent it, Tane also says.
He “challenged many preconceived ideas, for example by trusting players to explore by themselves (the universe), instead of listing all the points of interest on the map”, details Mark Brown.
The samurai to the rescue of technology
While working on “Ocarina of Time”, the first 3D component released in 1998, its creators came up against a major problem: how to allow the player to easily target an enemy with precision in a three-dimensional universe?
The click of the developers of Nintendo occurs while watching a film of samurais, whose hero is surrounded by ninjas that he faces one after the other. An enemy throws his kusarigama (a sickle connected to a chain) at him and moves in a circle around the hero, to whom he is bound by this taut chain.
These observations lead them to the creation of a so-called “Z aiming” system: this places the camera behind the hero automatically and helps him to focus on a character he wants to talk to or on an enemy to attack.
“It was really the perfect solution,” says Kiyoshi Tane. “Subsequently, action games multiplied – including on other consoles – by adopting the same principle. Maybe without +Ocarina of Time+, games on PlayStation and Xbox would have been very different.
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