Nintendo's Dev Teams Need Freedom To Experiment, According To President Shuntaro Furukawa

"Above all else, I base my decisions on the development leader’s way of thinking"

Reporter: "Why is Zelda: Link's Awakening having frame rate issue?
Furukawa: "I dunno, development manager told me it's performing ok so I told them to launch the game."

I mean, yeah, Nintendo needs fresh IP's that aren't considered storied, "kiddie," "dad rock," "meme," "Boomer" franchises by their target market. Splatoon is great although it's still juuust a tad on the "weird" side for people to get attached to.
And the storied franchises benefit from stretching their wings, too. BotW proved that. The challenge is to do so in the right way. And hopefully, BotW2 will balance what BotW1 pioneered (and was correct in critiquing, although overcorrected) with more of the memorable elements of the LoZ series (i.e. the LA/LttP/OoT/TP formula).

I hope that freedom to experiment also extends to lending the company's IP to other studios in collaborations.

Sometimes, a fresh studio is what a series needs to experience a revival. And I can think of quite a few of their IP that could use the phoenix treatment...

Wii U wasn’t really experimentation it was returning to the GameCube mindset and thinking that the Wii audience would “upgrade” to it, the gamepad struggled to find its purpose because all it really was was Miyamoto’s plan B because 3DTV failed, they would have launched a Super Wii U with a glasses-free 3D display gamepad to fulfill a dream they had since the GameCube days.

@SalvorHardin I disagree completely, given how they were pushing asymmetrical gameplay from the jump.

Don't know how you came to that conclusion.

I'm glad Nintendo knows how to choose their successor in running the company and not just pick any random suit guy off the street.

He is absolutely right, Nintendo is Nintendo because of their games/ip. It's why Nintendo is so incredibly iconic. Nintendo owns some of the most successful and culturally important IP in the world. Characters like Mario and Link and partner companies like Pokemon aren't just fictional characters, they are cultural icons.

It's honestly very surprising to hear him speak so positively of allowing developers freedom. I would not expect that of a businessman/company executive. Kudos to him. I think many business leaders tend to want to push their own ideas and methods on the company.

@nintendolie
A more accurate version of that conversation would be:

Reporter: "Why is Zelda: Link's Awakening having frame rate issue?
Furukawa: "I dunno, I dont care, the game sold really well and got great reviews"

I don't usually gripe on petty console wars but above all else this is exactly the reason I gave away my PS4 to a friend.

I only have time for two gaming machines at once. PC being one, I have to be picky with my second option. Sure, the handheld feature plays a part but I gotta say it's the games that pull me in the most.

Owning the PS4 for a few years I realised their exclusives mostly follow the same "cinematic" formula, it gets boring. Bloodborne excluded, people seem mostly oblivious to the fact that most of them are very similar to one another. Everyone seem to comment on how Nintendo doesn't make enough "new" IPs, but I've experienced much more "new" with Nintendo in the year I owned my Switch than the years I invested into my PS4.

Just my two cents.

I don’t really see this sentiment reflected in current Nintendo though. It was under Iwata and Kimishima that the craziest ideas, concepts, and IP were created. Ever since Furukawa came in, we’ve only received ports and sequels of already popular and established Nintendo franchises.

Maybe enough time hasn’t passed for him to show his stuff. But I’m ready for a new wave of Nintendo IP.

@ItsOKToBeOK Did you already forget that Nintendo just launched a Fitness RPG controlled entirely by a Pilates Ring last week? Or a dual character Action game from Platinum less than 2 months ago?

Game Development is a lengthy process, so obviously not everything will come to fruition right away.

Intriguing. Yeah, Nintendo is very iconic. For example, think back to all the Super Mario Bros., and Legend of Zelda merch in the latter half of the 80's, and very early 90's. Likewise, the merch of those 2 ips today. Speaking of, Nintendo needs to license a Super Mario Bros. 3 Monopoly., which also made me think of the unrelated-to-monopoly Nelsonic game watches, one of which was a take on SMB3. But it's late, and in the words of Blathers the Museum Curator Owl, "I digress..."

@Varkster That’s what happened to me at the end of the GameCube era. I had owned the PS2 (got rid of it pretty quickly) and XBox (loved Halo, but got bored quickly and eventually hacked it for emulators). I had missed out on Ocarina of Time and started playing it on the hacked Xbox. It was buggy and frustrating, but the game was amazing. Then Nintendo started offering a GameCube with Ocarina bundled in. I grabbed it immediately, and proceeded to discover that I wasn’t bored with gaming, I just really like Nintendo games.

@Joekun I feel you, most Nintendo games have a very fuzzy feel to them which you don't really get with other games I think..

@Varkster I have owned only one Sony console (PSP) and my favorites on it were PS1 RPG's by 3rd parties. I too have always felt that their own games are pretty samey and kind of gaming equivalent of Hollywood blockbusters.

@nintendolie The most irrelevant comment of 2019. For those curious, scroll up to comment number 1.

@Varkster I have the same feeling with the PS4. Aside from Bloodborne which I absolutely loved (I couldn't get into the Souls games before that), I don't think any of their other big name exclusives have gripped me.

They're just very linear experiences with far too much focus on story, constantly stopping you to show you overly long cutscenes or doing that thing where you can just walk really slowly as NPC's speak at you. The controls are always very similar even when the games are totally different and the mechanics are never that interesting, only ever really doing the utter minimum to push the narrative. The Last of Us always stood out to me in this regard, essentially being Uncharted but with mechanics actually removed (specifically the """""platforming""""), like 2 different enemies throughout the game and an abundance of sitting down "watching". You know there's an issue when two games such as the Last of Us and God of War, which sound like polar opposites on paper, feel so similar.

With Switch, even a game like Breath of the Wild which I wasn't very fond of, I at least keep going back to it and playing it because it's actually a game that I interact with and "play". I turn it on and there's a good chance I can just "play the game" for a full uninterrupted hour instead of spending 40 minutes letting the game play itself, the other 20 minutes shooting the same guys in a linear corridor. I don't think it's a brilliant game, but I'm still somewhat regularly going back to finish it 12 months later.

Meanwhile, I finally got around to Horizon Zero Dawn about 2/3 months ago (a game I was actually hyped and waiting for since before the PS4 released but just didn't get the time for it) and I got bored and stopped playing within a couple of hours. I liked the gameplay when I was fighting robot dinosaurs, but there was just so much """cinematic""" fluff that I felt I may as well just watch a Youtube playthrough. Being the first game I tried in my new place, my roommate came in and asked me how it was after about 30 minutes of play only for me to respond with, "I dunno, I'm still waiting to actually friggin' play it".

I still have my PS4 since I'm not desperate for the space or £100 I'll get from selling it (plus I just like having all the consoles), but it has been a glorified Bluray player for the past 12 months...Which is fitting as PS4 exclusives have become not much more than glorified movies (though they're never as deep, interesting or simply entertaining as a good movie). Even my Xbox One has gotten more use with Gamepass allowing me to play games like Ark and Sea of Thieves with my girlfriend, again, being games that just shut up and "let me play"...And I have a decent PC, I usually have nothing nice to say about the Xbox One especially given all its games are on PC, but it's getting far more use than the PS4.

Rant over.

@Varkster Sony blockbusters aren't directed by game designers but by business suits and scriptwriters. They're perfect in what they try to do but they're very formulaic and completely deny game design can be a creative art form. I often see on forums people complaining they get bored of videogames and they feel they are too old for them. But theirproblem isn't the age, their problem is they only play these hugely marketed blockbusters thinking they're the best games in the industry. People should follow more the creative stuff and less the big budget stuff if they get bored of videogames.

This is the first time since taking the job that I've heard him speak in a remotely "Nintendo-like" way about the company and it's operations. Every other interview to date has cast him as a fairly generic corporate bean counter set to please investors via any means possible. Never before this has he really sounded in tune with what we have known Nintendo to be at least after Yamauchi. It's refreshing...but I wonder why the change?

Also....is he starting to look like Iwata? Is this by coincidence or design?

Could this mean we might finally see a resurgeance for the F-Zero franchise?

@NEStalgia He said from the very beginning he wants Nintendo to keep doing what its' always done. Nothing's changed in terms of what his goals for Nintendo are. He did talk about wanting to improve their performance in the mobile market though, so I think that may have gotten you worried.

So they're NOT trying to be Disney... just "Disney Lite", I guess. The fixation on mobile gaming has me concerned,
DAMN YOU POKEMON GO! 😩

Nintendo’s innovation isn’t their seal of quality. I’m glad to hear that Furukawa is on track with that philosophy.