Super Mario Galaxy director/designer Yoshiaki Koizumi has been getting quite the spotlight since Mario’s latest adventure. In an interview with Wired, Koizumi talks about how he’s one of the main people trying to put more storyline into Nintendo games while EAD doesn’t really care either way.
YK: You’re right, EAD doesn’t tend to focus on the big story in most of their games. But I was the one coming up with scenarios, just on my own, ever since the time of Link’s Awakening. But even at that time, I felt like I came up with this entire scenario and a backstory for Link, but nobody really seemed to care. They were always saying, let’s not try to push the story forward too much.
So I would sort of try to find sneaky ways to get it in without them noticing too much. For example, I always liked the idea of you coming upon another character and hearing little bits of conversation that slowly begin to reveal different parts of the story. And that was the way that I tried to work on Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. A lot of the EAD games that do seem to have a lot of story, a lot of that came from my influence. But those are aspects of the games that Miyamoto wasn’t nearly as fond of and occasionally didn’t like.
The rest of the interview talks about how Koizumi first experienced the Super Mario series, working with Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario Sunshine‘s place in the series, sales of Galaxy, and what’s next.
