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During the March 2004 Game Developer's Conference Nintendo's Eiji Aonuma gave an interview to a select few websites, and Nintendo demanded that the interview not be published until two months after the event. Two months later, any hints that Nintendo gave out as to it's future and E3 plans are actually irrelevant since the real E3 2004 has come and gone.
But even now, after all of E3's surprises have become yesterday's news, the interview should not be overlooked. Aonuma's comments reveal the nature of his, and by extension Shigeru Miyamoto's and Nintendo's, usual approach to storylines and plot in its videogames. And it's not just interesting because it shows how Nintendo approaches game development. Nor is it interesting simply because it can highlight why Nintendo will never give us a plotline in the same vein that SquareEnix presents it's plotlines. It's interesting because it hints at Nintendo's understanding of the videogame medium.
Basically, the assumption is that developers look at story as independent of gameplay. This can either mean that the story is an excuse created to allow for missions and levels and content, or the story is a completely idependent part of the game (as in play through a dungeon, get a cutscene, play through this, get a cutscene). I think the Final Fantasy series demonstrates this well enough: not only are gameplay portions broken up and seeded with cutscenes that advance the story, but I think I'm not off-base in supposing that Final Fantasy stories are penned without too much interaction from the game play design department. Final Fantasy goes an extra step in the segregation of the two subjects by emphasizing story so heavily (the cutscenes, the character design, the plot events) in their Final Fantasy series as compared to the gameplay aspects.
Nintendo couldn't be further from this process. In fact, I'm inclined to suspect that Nintendo doesn't think at ALL about their storylines beforehand.
Aonuma states:
"But the way that we do it is maybe somewhat different from what they do, in the sense that with Zelda, we don't start off with a storyline and then build a game around it, we start off with a framework for the game, we create the game, and then we develop the storyline based on the type of game we've created."
To all those poor Nintendo fans who think they understand Nintendo, yet yearn for a Final Fantasy type story from the Big N, take note: This couldn't be a more drastically different approach to storylines in games than the approaches perhaps used in the Final Fantasy series. Instead, at first glance this approach seems to make the story subservient to the gameplay!
But to say that would be a knee-jerk reaction, it wouldn't be at all true.
Instead, Nintendo's approach to story is that it has to grow out of the gameplay, it has to grow out of the things players do, and grow out of things they need to learn about the world around them. Instead of artificially constructing a story independent from a game, and then jamming the two together, instead Nintendo's approach is downright organic, and attempts to fuse the two into a cohesive whole.
Since the story grows out of the needs and constraints of the game design, the story and environment can come to mirror constant themes in the basic gameplay. Mario 64 is a perfect example: instead of arbitrarily stringing together all the stages in some sort of real-world geographic hodge-podge, the varied and fantastical settings lent themselves perfectly to fantastical paintings that players needed to jump into to start the level. AND, since these paintings were isolated worlds, they could still contain an element of "bottomless pit" platforming (falling off the edge of the level in Mario 64) that is often lost in more "realistic" games that can't for the life of them explain why their hero can't swim, or why the entire world seems to be situated on the wall of a canyon, or why every pit has spikes on the bottom. It's not likely that Nintendo came up with the idea for a castle full of paintings beforehand. Instead, the demands of the gameplay they developed, the settings and bottomless pits, came to shape the very fabric of the game's plotline.
This organic method, I suspect, is also evident in Zelda games. For example: the great Deku tree in the beginning of Zelda 64 came about probably not because the game designers sat down and said: "let's have a big, fatherly tree to give the game a foundation in the beginning." I believe very strongly that they said something along the lines of: "this first level, this beginner's level, why not let it be inside this giant tree? And that tree...is sick because of the bad guys?" And from then on they developed themes of Ganondorf's quest for the three pendants (talismans? tokens? Sorry, I'm getting forgetful in my old age.), and the related subplots of the troubles befalling not just the Deku tree, but the Zora and Goron people as well.
In any case, this is an organic approach to stories in videogames, with gameplay taking precedent. It is vastly different in style from the way we approach other games, in which the story is fully fleshed out before game play elements are thrown in. And it is almost the opposite to an approach where the story is developed with little regard to gameplay synchronicity. In my opinion, this may be why Nintendo games can oftentimes uniquely feel like cohesive wholes, each part fully integrated.
Aonuma relates it thus:
"if you start off with a story and try to turn that into a game, you essentially end up with some of the Aku, or impurities, that [chuckles]-basically, things don't feel natural [since] you're trying to make a game based on a story and you aren't able to express everything the way you want to, whereas once you start with the game and build the story around that and you have your core framework, and then the story evolves based on what we're doing with the game."
This is why we won't see Nintendo creating drastically Final Fantasy-esque plotlines or extensively dramatizing it's next Zelda game. The way Aonuma approaches story is that plot isn't something that explains the game's existence in and of itself, but instead is so woven into the gameplay experience that to separate it would be to lose something in the process.
Now, I can't comment on the validity of other approaches to developing a story. The mainstream RPG genre, by it's nature, almost demands a thoroughly thought-out and pre-planned storyline at all costs, particularly to the detriment of gameplay. But even amidst all of this, just the very notion of integrating story and gameplay has an appeal. Why is it necessary for storyline and gameplay to be strangers to each other?
According to Nintendo, plot and gameplay go hand in hand.
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