Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of The Legend Of Zelda series, doesn’t like the controversial companion Navi either.
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According to an interview from 1999, which was discovered by Eurogamer, the legendary creator called the fairy the “biggest weak point” of the game.
Commenting on her famous repeatedly voice lines, Miyamoto said; “If you read Navi’s text, she says the same things over and over. I know it makes it sound bad, but we purposely left her at a kind of ‘stupid’ level,”.
“I think if we’d tried to make Navi’s hints more sophisticated, that ‘stupidity’ would have actually stood out even more. The truth is I wanted to remove the entire system, but that would have been even more unfriendly to players.”
He went on to say; “You can think of Navi as being there for players who stop playing for a month or so, who then pick the game back up and want to remember what they were supposed to do.”
Later in the interview, which was originally part of a strategy guide, Miyamoto spoke to the difficulty of the game, and how he feels about it; “I’m pretty bad at action games myself, so I wanted Ocarina to have a system with depth, something you could steadily improve at the more you played – though it didn’t need to be as complex as Tekken, of course,”
Towards the end of the interview, Miyamoto discussed his philosophy of level design in Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, specifically when it comes to dungeons.
“Instead of mapping your way through a maze, I think what’s more important is a sense of dread, a sense of pressure, and of course, an opportunity for finding secrets and solving puzzles – we should be pursuing an emotional immediacy, the sense that you are really there”.
