The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Latest official blog post (Memories)

This week again, Nintendo published a blog post about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the official blog of the Legend of Zelda portal in Japan. This time, the post was written by Naoki Mori, who was in charge of Cinematic Design (screenplay, cutscenes).

In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, players have a lot of freedom: they can go pretty much anywhere they wanted once they’ve made it out of the Great Plateau. Naturally, the developers had to find way to convey the story in a way that didn’t restrict players’ freedom.

Naoki Mori explains that they came up with this system of “watching a cutscene = Link regains a lost memory”.

When you’re gathering those “Memories”, the cutscenes are shown without any context, which makes you wonder what happened (especially if you haven’t seen them all). It’s a brand new experience, never-before-seen in the Legend of Zelda series, which had always followed a linear story progression system until now.

A great advantage of that Memories system is that you can rewatch the cutscenes at any time, as many times as you want, thanks to the Sheikah slate. You can get them in pretty much any order you want, but the Sheikah Slate conveniently lists them in chronological order. Once you have collected them all, why not watch them all again in chronological order?

Naoki Mori then goes on to talk about Princess Zelda, and her two main roles in the game:

• The Princess who Seals (Zelda’s traditional role, as seen in previous Zelda games)
• The Princess who Researches (ways to stop Calamity Ganon) (Zelda’s new role, as seen in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild)

When he took those two roles into consideration, the image of “The Princess that cannot use her sealing powers” was born. He explains that he would be pleased if this made players think “I want to help Zelda”, like in previous The Legend of Zelda titles.

In some specific area, you can find a diary with the thoughts of Zelda and the King of Hyrule inside. Those contents go in hand with Link’s Memories, so players are highly encouraged to find them all!

Previous blog posts:

• Post 1 (locations)
• Post 2 (outfits)
• Post 3 (animations)
• Post 4 (landscape)
• Post 5 (interiors)
• Post 6 (sound effects)
• Post 7 (main theme)

Source: Nintendo