Jesus f*cking christ people, stop trusting articles from Kotaku. This article should be in "The PATHETIC state of the gaming media" topic for showing how once again Kotaku is the videogame media equivalent to the tabloids at the supermarket that show on the front page that Dracula and Bigfoot recently got married in Iowa.
All Sakamoto said was he originally wanted the game to be a 2D sidescroller and play like one with NES controls. Which is no surprise considering this is the guy responsible for the 2D Metroids. Team Ninja wanted the game to be 3D and so they eventually came to a compromise.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/107/1076861p1.htmlTeam Ninja stepped in to work on the project and was selected because the team played off the Nintendo-based team extremely well, bouncing ideas back and forth throughout the development. Sakamoto used aspecific instance as an example: he insisted that the game would be an on-rails side-scrolling adventure that used the Wii remote exclusively like an NES/Famicom controller. But Team Ninja really wanted to make ita nunchuk-analog controlling game for 3D foreground/background exploration. Sakamoto stood firm on the Wii remote exclusivity. When the Team Ninja came up with an idea that could incorporate Sakamoto's Wii remote focus into a non-on-rails design, he was skeptical -- but when he finally saw what they came up with, he thought the solution was perfect. They called it "Famicom Game Plus."
As you can see, the guy who was responsible for the 2D Metroids, wanted to make a *gasp*, another 2D Metroid game. Not to mention a lot of Japanese designers refer to 2D games as on-rail sidescrollers all the time. Since in most 2D games your character only moves from right to left, that's considered moving on a set path, which is why when when a Japanese game designers talks about 2D games, there words can be translated as on-rails when describing what we'd just consider a 2D Platformer or 2D Action game.
So to summaries everything,
stop trusting article from Kotaku