Don't worry, Miyamoto doesn't like Navi either
Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto has admitted to disliking Navi, calling Ocarina of Time's fairy companion the «biggest weakpoint» of the game.
The comments come from a 1999 interview with Miyamoto originally printed in a Japanese strategy guide and now published online.
Commenting on the difficulty of the puzzles, Miyamoto admitted that the Navi hint system is «a little too unfriendly», though pursuing perfection in a hint system would drive the developers into a hole.
«If you read Navi's text, she says the same things over and over. I know it makes it sound bad, but we purposely left her at a kind of 'stupid' level,» said Miyamoto.
«I think if we'd tried to make Navi's hints more sophisticated, that 'stupidity' would have actually stood out even more. The truth is I wanted to remove the entire system, but that would have been even more unfriendly to players.»
He continued: «You can think of Navi as being there for players who stop playing for a month or so, who then pick the game back up and want to remember what they were supposed to do.» That's certainly a system more games should implement.
Difficulty is a prominent part of the interview. With Ocarina of Time being the first 3D Zelda game, Miyamoto and the development team had to carefully guide the player into the vast realm of Hyrule.
That's perhaps why Miyamoto himself focused heavily on the first section of the game culminating in the Deku Tree dungeon. He also pulled back on sword combat to make it simpler, though he admits to being disappointed with the results.
«I'm pretty bad at action games myself, so I wanted Ocarina to have a system with depth, something you could steadily improve at the more you played-though it didn't need to be as complex as Tekken, of
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