In a recent interview, Eiji Aonuma talked about voice acting in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
In an interview with Polygon, producer Eiji Aonuma addressed the addition of voice acting to the Legend of Zelda franchise in the upcoming release, Breath of the Wild. The decision was made because “it’s really difficult to leave an impression on players with just text,” adding that while not every bit of dialogue will be accompanied by voice acting, there are instances where the team wants to “leave impressions on users.” For those instances, Aonuma says “I add voice there.”
Link, however, will remain unvoiced. In my personal opinion, this is a smart move – Link, as a character, has always served as a conduit for players, an actual “link” between the player and the story. Aonuma appears to agree, as he wanted to maintain the relationship between the player and the Hero of (yea, we still don’t know his Hero Title yet).
“If Link said something the user doesn’t agree with, that relationship between the user and Link would be lost,” said Aonuma. “That’s why I chose not to go with that.”
Also in the interview, Aonuma talked about the game’s sci-fi elements, saying that he wanted to add technology to offset the ruined and very natural world that Link is adventuring through.
“Link basically adventures through a ruined world. I wanted to add technology as the opposite side of that,” he said. “I thought it would be interesting for Link to use technology to explore through this wild and ruined world. I figured that would add another layer to the game.”
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is set to be the largest game in Zelda‘s 20 year run, with Nintendo getting some assistance from Monolith Soft with the development process.
You can check out my hands-on impressions of Breath of the Wild from E3 (spoiler – they were good) here.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will release in March 2017 on the Wii U and Nintendo’s new system, codenamed NX.
