Tingle's Designer Takaya Imamura Has Parted Company With Nintendo

Tingle is the most horrible character ever. Just awful..

Its really a shame that he had to leave nintendo. (No I'm not going to hate all over tingles but I would if I wasn't trying to cut him some slack)

@Liam_Doolan could you update the ballen wonder world article its outdated, the demo is going to be in the us I put a link to it in the chit chat thread so you can see.

A man with an eye for true beauty.

Hope he has a good and enjoyable retirement.

@BlackenedHalo I think he's hilarious, I always wondered if his design was poking fun of bad Link cosplayers and fanboys who dress up as him?

@Clyde_Radcliffe Dan was Capcom making fun of SNK by putting Robert's head on Ryo's body (from the Art of Fighting series before they appeared in KOF).

The Tingle DS duology are among the best and unique games of the console tbh

I like Tingle, don’t understand what there is to hate. He’ll always represent the extremely weird side of Zelda that’s slowly been sucked out of the series over the years.

@nessisonett exactly. I don’t know why would anyone take the character seriously. He is just part of the quirky elements in Zelda games ... I was bummed when he didn’t make appearances on the latest games.

R.I.P. Nintendo (1889-2021)

@nessisonett It has started taking itself more seriously in recent years. I miss Miyamoto produced Zeldas. They were just more innocent, quirky and whimsical. Haven't really enjoyed the post Wind Waker games as much, even though I really tried to.

he's aged well!

Man 2021 is hitting hard...

In all seriousness though, what a great character.

So long, oh sweet, gallant prince.

You were there for us when we most needed you, with your boundless strength and tenderness, but now the time has come for you to rest.

Seeing a japanese guy with beard is always weird.

Oh, it even rhymes.

Tingle for Smash!

It's sad when any talented developer leaves Nintendo, wish him well in the future.

@BlackenedHalo He has his fans...

Oh wow. Godspeed Imamura San!

I feel like this dude always was the rockstar of the original design department. Which has rubbed off wonderfully on his designs.

@BlackenedHalo Actually he is a great character because he is unique, has personality and many gamers know him.

Wish him all the best.

Also I will not accept many Tingle slander in the chat. He is quite possibly the perfect being.

@Maxz I love Tingle, and miss him dearly.

I'd still take a complete package (hurr hurr) of DS Tingle remakes for Switch.

What has he worked on recently?

I have respect for these old guard but let's be real, Nintendo needs new blood.

New blood made Splatoon, Arms and were responsible for completely revolutionising Zelda.

This is quite sad to hear. He directed one of my favorite 3DS games of all time (Steel Diver). Best of luck to him.

The end of a era is coming. Sad times

@BlackenedHalo Agreed, but Tingle couldn’t be more Nintendo if he tried.

@Silly_G I almost spit my coffee out.

Makes sense that the man who created Tingle also made Captain Falcon. Nintendo's two paragons of masculinity!

@TJC04 Forget Shadow the Hedgehog; Tingle is the true ultimate lifeform!

I always felt that a 2 player mode in Wind Waker HD on Wii U in the form of an upgraded Tingle tuner using the gamepad was a huge miss opportunity.

Of course y'all felt the need to twist this into a Tingle hate-fest.

As a character himself, I can take or leave Tingle. He's just there for me. So I don't necessarily have any feeling about him one way or the other. I do appreciate the humor and weirdness of him and what it adds to Zelda. It keeps the series from being overly drab. Reminds us not to take it too seriously.

Nintendo got their revenge on Americans for hating Tingle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv92quD_wIY

I'm a big Tingle fan, I have all three of his spin off games on DS! I have fond childhood memories of playing Rosy Rupeeland

I genuinely loved Tingle in Majora's Mask.

MY SECRET WORDS! DO NOT STEAL THEM!

Happy retirement and thank you for your contribution to gaming!

@Clyde_Radcliffe Some of them put on a more serious front, but they're absolutely still full of weird fun.

I thought that said “Tingle was retired” and I almost had a heart attack.

Wish this legend the best.

I didn't really care one way or another about Tingle until I played Hyrule Warriors Legends and found out how freakishly annoying he is. As if Charles Martinet as Mario wasn't bad enough. I won't miss this guy, especially since F-Zero seems to be dead anyway.

Dang what an amazing artist with such diverse character design skills. Bizarre, mysterious, scary, cool, noble. The variety in his designs is great!

Seeing Tingle the first time in 1999 is when I realized Zelda was going downhill.

Horrible, awful character. I hope it never returns.

@daisygurl well, he might of created tingle but he doesn't own the copyright or trademark so it's not really up to him whether tingle gets used more or not.

The general reaction to Tingle does say that Nintendo's general idea on his popularity is on point. Big in Japan, divisive in the rest of the world. I'm pretty neutral on him since he seems like an alright guy, just very weird, and a good example of culture differences since he's considered hilarious in Japan. If Nintendo ever wants to push smaller, more experimental titles, I wouldn't mind a digital-only game focusing on him since those seem to be good.

As for Imamura, it seems like he's had a solid run when it comes to influence. Sad to see him leave, but hopefully the new guard adopts what he's learned for the future.

I used to be in the “hate Tingle” camp. But as I’ve gotten older and gotten more perspective...

Tingle is the happiest dude in all of Hyrule and Termina. He lives for his dreams, he is authentically himself, and he doesn’t care in the slightest what other people think of him. We could all stand to be a little more like Tingle

@nessisonett I think the extremely weird side of the series was a new phonemonon mostly of the Tingle era, though. Zelda 1 was pretty much completely "serious" (as serious as an 8 bit game could be), 2 was actually pretty dark. ALttP had a comic art style, but really was also serious straight through, leaning toward dark at moments. I can't recall any "silly" moments or characters really in ALttP (Edit: Other than the witch.) Even Ocarina was mostly serious, but with Aonuma it started introducing some more silly elements with some of the minigames and side characters. And that's around when Tingle was introduced as well.

If anything TP and BotW were a return to form of the first 3 games of being more or less all business. SS stands out with some pure silly though.

Zelda's unusual in that it's pretty much the only time Miyamoto ever did "all gritty". Everything else he's always done zomething zany in there or off the wall or cute or "very Japanese." But Miyamoto's Zelda games were all serious.