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Discover what graphic refining director Yoshiki Haruhana aimed for with the visual style of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
Nintendo has already released one dev blog on The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, which focused on the game's music. Today they're back with a second installment, this time looking into the game's graphics. Check out a snippet of the blog below, which was penned by graphic refining director Yoshiki Haruhana.
Instead of recreating the game with very modern graphics, we aimed to capture the simple universality that the pixel graphics of the time had. I hope that each person playing the game will project their own idea of Link’s Awakening onto the game as they play.
We also aimed to make the game world feel as though you’re peeking into a little diorama. Our vision for this game during development was to create a diorama world in which Link would be a 10cm-or-so tall figurine. We developed the game while imagining the world as if it might actually exist in miniature form, and so we aimed for a balance between two really contradictory ideas; to pursue the charm of a richly detailed creation, while also considering the scale we’d imagined for Link and being careful to avoid adding in too much detail beyond that. It turned out that finding this balance was much easier said than done!