Key assignment doesn’t seem like a big deal if you look at it objectively, but it was a great challenge to assign the same number of functions with significantly fewer keys to work with, and once we assigned one, we had to reassign another. That thing happened when we decided to assign items to the B trigger button. Until then, we had been using the B trigger button for the sword control, but actually, ever since we started reconsidering the key assignment for the sword at E3, we already decided that we had to go with another control, the control that users wanted to perform. I’m talking about the motion sensor swing. When we were developing the E3 version, we knew that it felt strange for Link to be left-handed, so we removed that, but if we still wanted to implement that control, we would have to make him right-handed. However, in order to do this, we would have had to redo Link’s character in the game, which, with only four months left in development, would have been impossible.

It was at that time that we thought if we flipped the entire world laterally, so that left and right were reversed, Link would be right-handed, and that decision to use this bold solution was made. Some of the staff members criticized the idea, saying that it wasn’t the final course layout that they designed and that the composition would be thrown off. They had a hard time with it at first, but after personally playing the game, the feeling of strangeness was gone after only a week, and in contrast, the original GameCube version started to feel strange. I knew that end users would feel the same way and I convinced my staff of this as well. Of course, the effect of these changes was immense, and giving the player the ability to swing the remote to make Link swing his sword was imperative to this game.

In the beginning, we thought about making it so that the player could swing the remote vertically to have Link swing his sword vertically, and horizontally to have Link swing his sword horizontally. But in the end, we decided to make it so that no matter which way the remote was swung, Link would swing his sword. If the sensor is made to detect direction, the response is inevitably effective. We made our decision because whenever a player is immersed in a game, they really aren’t thinking about whether they are moving the remote vertically or horizontally and really wasn’t a benefit to the experience unless they are making a conscious effort to think about what they were doing. But rather than adding that distinction, we decided to make ease and comfort our priority so that players knew when they swung their remote, Link would swing his sword. In order to test this new version and see how playable it really was, we held an internal playtest. When I saw some of our female employees defeating a giant boss, I was confident that as with the DS Zelda, the realistic Zelda had been reborn.