Wind Waker refreshed for Wii U in six months

Nintendo’s enhanced release of the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for Wii U took just six months to develop, the game’s producer Eiji Aonuma has explained.

Speaking to Japanese site 4Gamers (translated by Siliconera), Aonuma said that redeveloping the 2003 GameCube title was still difficult because the team had to consider the “difference in hardware this time”.

“Additionally there is a technique known as toon shading, which gives the game a very animated look. At that time, the technique was established, but had not been used before by our staff, everyone had to do everything by hand,” said Aonuma.

As well as this, Aonuma and his team also spent time changing the Wii U version to widescreen. It’s something which has say they wished to do for dramatic effect, but that also cause obscured characters to appear on-screen at inopportune moments which then had to be manually edited out.

“For dramatic purposes, we would have characters we didn’t want in the frame, out of sight, but on the 16:9 ratio, you could still see those characters,” he said.