About 75% of all Nintendo interviews where somebody else describes a thing Miyamoto said or did are like "Miyamoto-san suggested we needed to improve the level flow, but didn't offer any specific feedback. After wracking our brains, we remembered he was eating ice cream at the time during our meeting. We realized that was his way of telling us we should be making an ice level instead of a lava one and that's how we ended up creating the most iconic sliding ice block puzzle in the history of video games, which is something we're all incredibly proud of and couldn't have done without Miyamoto-san's invaluable insight."
- He/him
- freelansations.com/
A most of the time Japanese>English game translator and writer and all the time dating sim wonk.
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in reply to @iiotenki's post:
I think its very funny as well when this style of nintendo interview gets passed around as like super sage interview, and its got a game that you look at and go "oh you just did this other game but in your style" lol
I feel like that happened with BoTW/ToTK a lot, which are just a Nintendo spin on an Ubisoft Open World game in a lot of ways, but we can't say that part out loud because Nintendo is always Innovative.
Part of that comes down to a general reticence on the part of Japanese companies in general to name other creators/companies if they're not present, less because they're entirely unwilling to give credit where it's due so much as a general desire to not drag them into a conversation uninvited, at least from what I've discerned over the years. Different companies/creators toe that line more firmly than others, but I do agree that in the case of Nintendo, it does result in them getting more credit than they're truthfully due for pioneering certain types of games. I feel like Eiji Aonuma at least has been somewhat more open about his personal inspirations that have gone into the last couple of Zelda games, but yeah, it probably wouldn't kill them to relax a little more and be a bit more forthright. Acknowledging their influences more consistently isn't gonna diminish the overall sheen people see in their games, I reckon.