Zelda: The Wind Waker HD Remake Was Developed In Six Months Says Producer

In a recent 4Gamer interview, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma discussed his work on the various upcoming Zelda games from Nintendo. While we translated part of the interview regarding the future of Zelda last week, Aonuma also discussed The Wind Waker HD and its development.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD, the Wii U remake of the GameCube game, was developed in just about six months, Aonuma shared. “Development was still difficult,” he added. “You had to consider the difference in hardware at the time.”

“Additionally there is a technique known as toon shading, which gives the game a very animated look. At that time, the technique was established, but had not be used before by our staff, everyone had to do everything by hand.”

Aonuma adds that, due to hardware limitations, there were certain things that Nintendo wanted to do on the GameCube with The Wind Waker, and found that they had “just enough room” to do them. Meanwhile, the Wii U version takes the presentation of the game a step further by adding widescreen support, which actually resulted in certain scenes having to be changed.

“For dramatic purposes, we would have characters we didn’t want in the frame, out of sight, but on the 16:9 ratio, you could still see those characters,” Aonuma shares. These characters, he adds, had to be edited out of the frame manually for the game’s final release.