I’m starting to love the Iwata Asks articles, not because of the awkward spontaneous laughing, but the amount of interesting details they keep revealing about games…
- Unique “transformation system” used for the desert, so the team made three separate areas
- The desert becomes a sea
- You’ll need to use a boat once this happens
- The dungeon you head into is a stage set on a ship drifting around a desert sea
- Staff wanted to make the desert have gameplay that was of contrast
- Early on, the team researched/experimented making use of the Wii’s capabilities so players could go back/forth between the past/future in an instant, wherever and whenever they wanted
- Transformation system was a result of the experiment the team did for gameplay with contrast in the desert
- Cut through space and that becomes the past
- Strike a Timeshift Shone in the desert to turn the present into the past in a widening circle
- In the present, Link is in a desert region, with an ancient civilization lying underneath all the quicksand
- Hitting the Timeshift Stone reveals the civilization
- If you make a broken cart move after the transformation, you can’t use it in the present but when you return to the past, it work Characters/enemies in the desert area have robots running on electricity
- Team wondered if they would call it electricity in the Zelda world
- Tried to avoid a robot design that would look too mechanical
- Hesitation to put in anything mechanical originally
- The robots don’t seem out of place; Fujibayashi believes this is because of the designers’ skill
- Designers tried to give the robots a softer appearance
- There are puzzles you can’t see when you’re walking around in the present
- You’ll get an ancient map, so you understand how that area was long ago
- Then you overlap the present circumstances onto that
- Can’t advance into certain places due to the quicksand; ancient map shows there are ruins hidden underneath
- Map serves as a hint for making progress
- For the second desert area, Fujino thought of using Dowsing for something on the move rather than elements that stay still early on in the game
- This led to his thinking of using a big ship roving the seas and the player has to search for it
- Transformation system is vast in scope
- Takemura believed they could make a whole game out of the transformation system
- Third area may have the most transformation gameplay
- Two sets of data made for everything due to the system
- Use Wii MotionPlus in special ways to solve mechanisms in the desert
- Twist things and insert them
- Enemies are used to help solve puzzles
- Ampilus enemy appears in the desert
- There was a ton of material, so the team decided to structure the desert into three areas
- There is a building important to the story in the desert
- The desert as a whole is the scene of a big turning point within the story
- It’s also a level up in swordplay, item use, and puzzle-solving
