Abstract:
Navi in "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" is the most iconic elf companion in the entire series. The annoying and cute phrase "Hey, listen to me" that is always whispered in the ear is still a classic memory of the Zelda series after many years. However, the original setting of this elf was completely different from the luminous ball with wings that we know and love today - her final appearance was entirely due to the technical limitations of the Nintendo 64 console.
Nintendo veteran and "Ocarina of Time" designer Koizumi Yoshiro revealed this matter as early as 2011 in the "Iwata Question" interview. With the upcoming remake drawing players' attention back to the original, YouTube channel Kit & Krysta dug up this old interview and caught our attention. Just imagine, Link's partner in "Ocarina of Time" is not a faceless glowing ball of light? According to Koizumi Yoshiko, Navi was originally designed as a humanoid character.
Kanko Koizumi said: "Generally speaking, when making elf characters, they will be made into cute girl images, but the function of Nintendo 64 cannot do this, so I made them into light balls with wings."
This initial design direction is reasonable. After all, in previous 2D Zelda works, the elves were all girl-like images similar to Tinker Bell. I personally speculate that the amount of detail in the humanoid model was too large. It was almost unrealistic to cram it into such a small character while ensuring the basic performance of animation and AI at the time.
Kanko Koizumi is also the core designer of the Z lock system in "Ocarina of Time". This system does not use the traditional screen cursor, but uses Navi as the lock logo. In the same interview, he mentioned that Navi was born simply because he didn’t want to use the same generic mark.
He said: "I am a designer and I don't want to use such a simple mark. I wanted to do something different, so I thought of elves. After all, this is "The Legend of Zelda"."
Imagine if Nintendo made Navi a more realistic female image in the remake of "Ocarina of Time", it would feel both funny and a bit inconsistent. Fortunately, the official live footage has confirmed that Navi is still the same iridescent light ball, but the modeling is more rounded. But it’s strange to think about it: if the performance of the N64 processor had been stronger back then, Navi’s image would most likely not be what it is now.
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