Best Nintendo Interview Ever! (Why Nintendo Games Lack Story)

[DMiller]

This is by far the most interesting interview I ever read from someone with Nintendo. It's with Yoshiaki Koizumi (Galaxy's director) and he talks about how cryptic Miyamoto can be, why Nintendo games have so few story elements, and how he wrote the entire story for Link's Awakening after being told to write the manual. Read and discuss.


Wired

[Dark Jaguar]

What a happy accident Link's Awakening turned out to be considering how much I love that game's story. Then again, I tend to read in and add so much EXTRA to a storyline as I experience that what I remember being the story and what was actually said in the game are two totally different things. I mean I had deep meaning behind almost every element in the game, right down to the acorns of greater defense (the wood defending the land, as the Wind Fish remembers the time of the great deku tree). I don't normally read into it that much, but it was a DEMI-GOD'S DREAM WORLD, I HAD to there.

However, as Penny Arcade has recently made clear and with which I very much agree, different people play games for different reasons. They've both pretty much mellowed out and accepted the total lack of objectively determining what's good and bad about games. I play my games for the whole experience. I'm basically a red mage of taste. I love a good story when it's there. I love just the whole experience, as in how I love my kingdom hearts and that includes the cut scenes even if they are basically movies. I loved blocking all those blaster shots with my keyblades even if it was just a button combo press. The net experience gets me. I also love the challenge. For me, the best games bring as many different elements to the table at once as possible, even if a few are included in spite of being only roughly finished. Another might prefer consistancy though.

Um, anyway yeah, I never expect much from a Mario story except that it's enough to drive the action. If it's a little more engaging that's fine too though.

Incidentally, I'm sure some of you have beaten Galaxy by now. Do the koopa kids show up in it at all? I've been wondering ever since I saw all those classic koopa airships and that old music. I really don't want that bratty Bowser Jr to replace the far more interesting and varied koopa kids. Seriously he'd actually be more interesting if he had to compete with older siblings for attention. Eh this goes back to how I love the total experience of a game.

[DMiller]

I haven't beaten Galaxy yet, but I'm close enough to pretty much think that the Koopa kids aren't in it. I do love the return of the airships, though, even if Bowser Jr. is piloting them about.

One of the interesting things I took from that interview apart from the story elements is how Miyamoto teaches. It seems like Nintendo in general is great at fostering creativity, which can be an incredibly difficult thing to do. As a teacher I see this all the time from kids who can't stand open-ended directions and it takes me quite some time to eek creativity out of some of the kids. The fact that Nintendo seems to do this from the top down explains why their games always generally seem to break the mold.

[Dark Jaguar]

Well fact is, some kids just aren't creative. I myself can't come up with something inventive at all. To my credit though, I DID learn how to trick adults into thinking I was smarter than I was, more or less by accident. Apparently if I just pull the internal slot machine of my mind and mix and match random things, I get praised. I knew it was bull back then, and the adults sure as punch didn't really think it was creative, but when you are "a kid", they sure enough vastly underestimate you enough that if I wanted "creative", I just put a cat on the moon which is made of a twinkie and BAM, instant A.

[A Black Falcon]

YK: The situation is totally different now. There are so many people with so many different job titles. But back then, the people who wrote the manuals often became the people who came up with most of the backstory for the entire game. The first real game work that I did was on Link's Awakening. But at the same time, I came in to write the manual, as I did on the previous game. But they had nothing in place. So I ended up making an entire story to go along with the game. The dream, the island, that was all mine.

So that's why Link's Awakening has the best story in the Zelda series? Wow...

YK: When you think about the whole "save the princess" storyline of games being one of Miyamoto's inventions, I don't think of that as a story so much as it is a goal. It's a way of creating a situation. There's not necessarily a buildup and a resolution of a deeper kind, like you'd find in a novel. It's just a situation that motivates the players. Lacking that kind of detailed nuance, that doesn't mean I'm not interested in a story at all. It's just that as a designer, my priorities are a little different. I tend to convey emotion in slightly different ways rather than just rely on the most obvious kind of narrative that we would think of when we think of storylines.

So Miyamoto gives you the goal, and that's what you needed in Donkey Kong to play through and accomplish it with the right sense of motivation. And it's true that Miyamoto may think of other things outside of that as perhaps extraneous. But that doesn't mean it's the wrong way to make games. It's just two very different styles.

I think that's a good way of putting it. "Save the princess" isn't a plot, it's a situation used as an excuse to get you to play the game and nothing more. Miyamoto uses it so much because he doesn't actually care about the stories in his games... just the gameplay. As he says.

A lot of the EAD games that do seem to have a lot of story, a lot of that came from my influence. But those are aspects of the games that Miyamoto wasn't nearly as fond of and occasionally didn't like.

I happen to like both story and gameplay... I would admit that gameplay is more important than story (there are games with no plot at all (or at least, no plot outside of the manual) that work fine), but most games need both.

[Dark Jaguar]

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