4th December 2007, 6:33 PM
Quote: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...
Quote: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.
Quote: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.