It turns out that Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto isn’t exactly a fan of Navi either, according to a recently translated interview.
Love her, hate her, any which way, the blue fairy Navi certainly left an impression on players in 1998. Many found her repetitive pieces of advice grating, and more of a hindrance than anything else.
It turns out that Miyamoto himself didn’t like Navi either. Shmupulations recently translated a developer interview from a Japanese strategy guide for Ocarina of Time. And in it was a few interesting bits of information, including Miyamoto’s opinions on Navi.
“I think the whole system with Navi giving you advice is the biggest weakpoint of Ocarina of Time,” said Miyamoto in the interview. “It’s incredibly difficult to design a system that gives proper advice, advice that’s tailored to the player’s situation.” The renowned game developer goes on to talk about how giving relevant advice would take as much time as developing a whole game.
“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.”
Miyamoto actually wanted to remove the entire system, but knew that that would be very unfriendly to players. Navi was more meant to be something for players who stopped playing for a month and tried to pick the game up again.
The whole interview is worth a read, as it gives an insight we probably wouldn’t be able to get today. Though to be fair to Navi, she really was just trying her best. After all, Link was just some kid who thought it was alright to break into people’s homes and smash their pots.
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Featured Image Credit: Nintendo