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javi741 on 20 December 2023
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Wman1996 said:
Soundwave said:

They could have made Wind Waker as the second Zelda on the system.

Making it as the first Zelda game at a time where the GameCube badly needed a system seller was extremely irresponsible.

Miyamoto hated the Wind Waker art style too, the Zelda team hid what they were doing from him and when he first saw it he "cringed" and then stated it would hurt the sales of the game.

And he was 100% right.

If you want to do that fine, make it the 2nd Zelda on the system (2nd Zelda games tend to be more experimental), but you can't be serious and do shit like that as the main Zelda. You have a responsibility to sell systems, that's an example of what happens when you let the inmates run the asylum. You end up with a system that can't even outsell the XBox, which was Microsoft's 1st attempt at a console.

The other problem is that they were desperate to get out a Zelda for GameCube, so Wind Waker didn't have very long of a development. 2001-2005 Nintendo really seemed uncharacteristically reluctant to delay games. We also saw that with Super Mario Sunshine, which launched less than a year into the GCN's life.

Post-2005 mindset Nintendo probably would've released Wind Waker (or some other 3D Zelda) around Holiday 2003 globally, and Sunshine probably would've been a Holiday 2002 or February-May 2003 release.

Shoot, even Super Smash Bros. Melee which is very highly-rated as well was rushed. It only had about 13 months of development, and the six clones were in there because they didn't have time to make more unique fighters. 

I still don't know what Nintendo was thinking having a cel-shaded Zelda with a lot of sailing as the first new Zelda game on GameCube. Even though Wind Waker is a loved game after launch and now, the optics at the time were horrible. 

I think Nintendo moreso was totally unprepared for the GC generation, the amount of games they rushed out is pretty surprising and uncharacteristic of Nintendo. They rushed out Melee, Mario Sunshine, Windwaker, Metroid Prime, ect.... Tbh it just seemed like Nintendo's software teams didn't want to stop supporting the N64 but were just forced to. The GC was even aimed to release in 2000 alongside the PS2 but Nintendo delayed it cause the software wasn't ready, and even then they were forced to rush the games just to release it at a managable time window. I don't think it was that smart for Majora's mask to be such a late gen N64 title when that time could've gone towards releasing a more refined GC game on time.

I think the difficulty of developing N64 games completely threw off Nintendo's development cycles which would go on to hurt the GC's development cycle early on. By the time developers were just beginning to get the hang on the N64's hardware, it was already too late and Nintendo needed to release the GC and force development teams to rush their games to make it on time.