Shigeru Miyamoto's 'Bad' Game

Shigeru Miyamoto (Nintendo's lead creator of Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong) recently discussed one of his games he wished he had done more with. In an interview, he said,

"I wouldn't say that I've ever made a bad game, per se, but a game I think we could have done more with was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link."

"When we're designing games, we have our plan for what we're going to design but in our process it evolves and grows from there," Miyamoto said. "In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper."

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is my second favorite game of all time, second only to the original Zelda. For Miyamoto to say that he thinks he could have done better absolutely baffles me. Many people say Zelda II is the "black sheep" of the series and I can see why. To start, the game is incredibly difficult. The world of Hyrule in this installment offer you nearly nothing in terms of guidance. It's up to you as the player to explore and find the clues in order to progress through the adventure (albeit ridiculously obscure at times, but they're there).

The other reason this game is seen as "different" from the rest of the series is the fact that the game is half overhead view
and half sidescrolling view. This has never been seen in any other games in the series. This is one of the aspects Miyamoto wishes he could have done more with.

"So one thing, of course, is, from a hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two. But, because of the limitations on how quickly those scenes changed, we weren't able to."

Looking back at the game, there was a minor delay in the transition between scenes but I didn't really understand what Miyamoto meant by using the sidescrolling vs overhead view more effectively. My assumption is that if he could have made these transitions more seamless without having to cut away from the action, they wouldn't have had to separate dedicated combat and travel "modes". Miyamoto also says,

"it would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn't capable of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot of effort."

You know even back then, Miyamoto wanted to create the massive boss battles we love in games like Ocarina of Time and Skyward Sword. He has always strived to create unique experiences which no one has ever created before and his departure from the norm in Zelda II truly left me with an experience unlike any other in gaming.

If Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is Shigeru Miyamoto's idea of a "disappointing" game, I pray he tries to incorporate more from this wonderful game into his future Zelda games.