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The "Legend of Zelda" series is full of iconic characters that have been introduced over the storied series' many installments.
Transcript
00:00Say hello to a Legend of Zelda character who almost… wasn't?
00:04The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time is inarguably one of the most well-received
00:10video games ever created. It holds the ultimate Metacritic score of 99,
00:14with other hit Legend of Zelda titles like Breath of the Wild, Twilight Princess,
00:18and The Wind Waker also scoring in the upper 90s. However,
00:22the game notably features a nearly universally hated side character, Navi.
00:30Navi is Link's fairy companion in Ocarina of Time. He receives her from the Deku Tree
00:34as a gift to help guide him on his quest to save Hyrule, and many would agree her advice
00:39is helpful for beginners. Most of her tips throughout the game point Link towards how
00:43to use items or strategies for defeating specific enemies. In other words, she basically functions
00:48as a living tutorial. However, as the game goes on, the way she forces her advice onto you can
00:53grow to be extremely annoying to some players. Some even just hate her high-pitched,
00:58HEY! LISTEN! call-out in and out of itself. One commenter wrote in GameFAQs,
01:02It's the fact that she constantly gives out useless advice, and constantly blurts out,
01:07HEY! and LISTEN! at incredibly random times. Then there's those times when she'll stop you
01:12to tell you something you probably already knew, and she'll talk very slowly. But perhaps the most
01:17frustrating thing about these four stopping points is the fact that they are also unskippable,
01:22so players need to deal with another unneeded tutorial whether they like it or not.
01:26Oh my God, shut up!
01:27Because of these factors, Navi has been the subject of many internet memes over the years.
01:32However, what fans might not realize is that even the series' creator, Shigeru Miyamoto,
01:37didn't like her either. Shumplations, a fan-operated translation site,
01:41uploaded a translated interview with Shigeru Miyamoto from a 1999 Famitsu magazine issue.
01:47In the interview, Miyamoto discusses his thoughts on the much-hated mascot of Ocarina of Time and
01:52other topics, such as cut features from the game. Miyamoto told the interviewer,
01:57I think the whole system with Navi giving you advice is the biggest weak point of Ocarina of
02:02Time. He further explained that it's incredibly difficult to design a game that gives proper
02:06advice based on the player's specific situation, particularly in the days of the Nintendo 64.
02:12It'd be so difficult, in fact, that the team would need to spend the same amount of time
02:16developing the entire game as they would on just the advice-giving programming portion of it.
02:20Naturally, that meant the team had to skimp on perfecting Navi,
02:23much to the eternal annoyance of a large section of the Zelda fanbase.
02:27Things might have been different.
02:29Miyamoto acknowledges that Navi says the same things over and over,
02:33but that the team purposefully left her at a kind of stupid level as the development
02:36process neared completion. However, if Miyamoto had his way, Navi would have never made it past
02:41the testing phase. That's right, in another world, Navi might have been left on the cutting room
02:46floor, changing Ocarina of Time forever. At this point, more than two decades removed
02:51from the release of The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, it's hard to imagine the game without
02:55Navi. Even though she's proven to be a constant annoyance for many players, she's also undeniably
03:00recognizable. Much like numerous memes and creepypastas have been made out of the scarier
03:04moments of Majora's Mask, Navi has cemented herself as an integral part of the culture
03:09surrounding the game. As Miyamoto revealed to Famitsu, he briefly considered scrapping
03:14the pesky sprite altogether during development. Ultimately, though, he realized that Navi was
03:19something of a necessary evil within the design of the game. He said, laughing,
03:23The truth is, I wanted to remove the entire system, but that would have been even more
03:27unfriendly to players. You can think of Navi as being there for players who stopped playing
03:31for a month or so, who then pick the game back up and want to remember what they were supposed to
03:35do. Navi might not be the most beloved character in Zelda history, but that doesn't mean she doesn't
03:40have her fans. Some players have argued that her constant tips and uppity personality are more cute
03:46than frustrating, so maybe it's for the best that she made it to the finished game.