As we’ve noted on the site, long-running franchises sometimes do things like spinoffs to try to “spice things up” and give their fans something they didn’t expect. Mario is legendary for doing this in his franchise, as he’s done sports games, minigame-focused titles, RPGs, and even had his companions lead games like Peach and Luigi. But for The Legend of Zelda, they’ve done considerably fewer spinoffs in the past. The ones they did do were incredibly focused or were meant to coincide with a certain console property, such as with a certain crossbow game. Fans may wonder if something bigger in the spinoff realm could happen soon.
While nothing is impossible, Eiji Aonuma returned to the interview circuit once again to reveal that one particular kind of spinoff isn’t likely to happen. Super Mario Maker was a huge hit when it came out because it allowed gamers to make their own levels with Mario and friends and do it as big or small as they wanted. But could we get a “Zelda Maker” title? Aonuma said this to Polygon about the idea:
“When we’re creating games like Tears of the Kingdom, I think it’s important that we don’t make creativity a requirement. Instead we put things into the game that encourage people to be creative, and give them the opportunity to be creative, without forcing them to. There are people who want the ability to create from scratch, but that’s not everyone. But I think everyone delights in the discovery of finding your own way through a game, and that is something we tried to make sure was included in Tears of the Kingdom; there isn’t one right way to play. If you are a creative person, you have the ability to go down that path. But that’s not what you have to do; you’re also able to proceed to the game in many other different ways. And so I don’t think that it would be a good fit for The Legend of Zelda to necessarily require people to build things from scratch and force them to be creative.”
It’s true that The Legend of Zelda has slightly dabbled in something like this via a remake of a Game Boy title, but that was on a small scale, and even then, it wasn’t hailed as a big thing, nor something repeated afterward.
But with certain advances in technology, the possibility of having such a “maker title” is not nil.
