Sakurai: "Zelda is becoming a tiresome routine"

[benoit489]

Very Close. Very Different (Sakurai Column 527)

Looks like he really enjoyed the game. He wrote this article comparing Horizon Zero Dawn to Breath of the Wild for the Japanese magazine, Famitsu.

It's a pretty basic article where he compares and contrasts the two titles. He enjoyed them both very much, but the rough translation of Zelda being tiresome gave me a chuckle. Maybe he means it's more of a grind than Horizon?

 

[Demon_Skeith]

So he's just tired of making Zelda games?

 

[benoit489]

Sakurai doesn't make Zelda games.

 

[CM30]

Sakurai makes the Smash Bros series and Kid Icarus Uprising, and previously created Kirby.

As for it being a grind... eh, I can sort of see what he means. There's definitely a lot more in the way of smaller tasks to do in Breath of the Wild, and 100% completion is an extremely lengthy affair (especially those Korok Seeds and armour upgrades).

That said, it's all about realism vs convenience, and Breath of the Wild is arguably far further towards the former than other sandbox games of a similar style. You're still powerful and all that stuff, but you're not superhuman and fixing stuff/getting things working isn't as quick as snapping your fingers. So it can be very much a grindy game that gets tiresome if played for too long, but that's really just the trade off made for a more immersive world.

 

[Porkman]

By now i'd assume Sakurai is tired no matter what he does. I did have to give Zelda a break after its completion (after pouring 120+ hours into the game) but I do love turning the game back on and just searching for new things I never noticed. I'm still not bored of it and don't think I will be anytime soon (currently at 140+ hours)

 

[OursIsTheFury]

I think it's more of adventure games in a nutshell. Skyrim, Witcher 3, Fallout 4 even; they all follow a similar pattern of you the main character being everyone's errand boy for the majority of the game. You have to finish this task to get to the next area, where you have to do another task to get to the next area. It's pretty tiring once in a while, and if you ever finish the game and want to start all over, the daunting task of doing all those quests before you can get to the "good part" of the game.