Some excerpts from Aonuma's interview with Edge about A Link to the Past 2 and his career:
"This new title will feature lots of things that are new to the series; right at the start of the game, there's a big surprise that will shock players. We started out with the new play mechanics, such as Link being able to become a painting and walk along the walls, and then figured out from there how to build a story around them. Rather than forcing elements of the original story into this one, we’ve instead focused on bringing back the characters, so you can see what happened to them after the events of the first game."
"Part of what made A Link To The Past interesting was the way you could move between the Light World and the Dark World and solve puzzles, and we’re planning to bring that back in A Link To The Past 2 for sure. Link's ability to become a painting will be related to that."
"I'm 50 now, so I only have about ten more years to make games at Nintendo. I want to try all sorts of new things before it’s too late – I don’t want to get to the end of my career and only have worked on Zelda. But every time I come up with some good new ideas, they end up being used in a Zelda game! I need a six-month break to get away from the Zelda cycle and focus on something new [laughs]. But I'd probably end up making a game that's similar to Zelda; after all, A Link To The Past was my biggest influence."
