BUILDING A BRIDGING GAME
Iwata explains he didn't invite Mr. Aonuma or Mr. Tezuka (producers of the game) because he wanted to ask Mr. Miyamoto's opinion on the game.
 
Mr. Miyamoto says he likes games where you can walk freely with a first person view, like FPS. The reason behind that is that you don't look down when you walk in real life, so those games feel natural. Actually, they thought of making Ocarina of Time with that kind of perspective, but the system's capabilities weren't the ideal, and since they came up with the idea of Link growing up, you would need to see the character on screen to notice the changes.
 
When asked why he thought there were many people who didn't like FPS, especially in Japan, Mr. Miyamoto replied that he didn't know the answer to that. Mr. Iwata then states that he thinks Japanese people and Westerners have a different grasping of the 3-D space. Whereas hunters are good at it, agricultural people do not.
 
Mr. Miyamoto explains that he's not very good at FPS, but he finds them fun. He thinks that there are no borders for fun, simple concepts and illustrates it with Wii Sports. At first, people from America told them such a simple concept wouldn't be a hit in America, but they were proven wrong when the game came out. So he created Link's Crossbow Training to show people who didn't like FPS that those kind of games can also be fun. Originally, FPS were just shooting games focused on a single screen and everyone enjoyed them, just like when they played with a cork gun in a fair, or target practice at an amusement park.
 
When Golden Eye came out, it helped spread the genre in America, where FPS evolved and many were released for PC. But this didn't happen in Japan in the same scale, and Mr. Miyamoto accepts it was in part their fault for not developing fun FPS games, and so there was a big space between simple shooting games and complex FPS. Nintendo developed Link's Crossbow Training as a species of bridge to help people cross that space. There were many suggestions for the name (like, "Link no Bougan Kyoushitsu [Link's Crossbow Classroom]," "Hajimete no Wii Zapper [My First Wii Zapper]," and "Zelda no Densetsu, Maboroshi no Bougan [The Legend of Zelda, the Phantom Crossbow]"), but they stuck with "Link's Crossbow Training."
 
THE "PROCESS" ITSELF IS THE "REWARD"
Link's Crossbow Training is similar to Majora's Mask in that both games are spin-offs of a previous Zelda game and they used the system of their predecessor, but in a different way. Between each Zelda game there normally is a period of three to five years, but with this game they were able to give the player the opportunity to play in the same world from Twilight Princess in a different way. The staff started thinking of a story to include in the game, but there were so many ideas that it wouldn't be a spin-off anymore. Then, Mr. Miyamoto suggested making it a game that used the Wii Zapper and that's how the project took form. The staff was reluctant at first, but when they received good feedback from testers in NOA, they decided to continue developing the game.
 
The rounds last approximately three minutes so that you can replay them without finding it too tedious and to have all the game elements concentrated in a small place. Mr. Miyamoto states that when you play a game, you want to see how the next stage will be like, or whether there's a boss next. "Rewards" are important in games, but people play because the whole "process" to get the "rewards" is fun by itself, and not just for getting the results of the "rewards." Many developers get this the other way and they focus more on the "rewards," but Mr. Miyamoto was conscious of this and he asked the staff not to follow that style; he even asked them not to include a boss. In the end, the game has one boss, though.
 
The game's centered on the idea of making it pleasant to play with the Wii Zapper.
 
IT ALL STARTED WITH WIRES AND RUBBER BAND
As he said in the Mario Kart Wii volume of the Iwata Asks series, Mr. Miyamoto wanted to make games that came in big packages, and this is the third one. The first design of the Wii Zapper, shown at the 2006 E3, looked more like a gun, but they hadn't developed any games that used the Wii Zapper. Even Metroid Prime 3, a FPS, wasn't that compatible with it. On the other hand, some companies released their own gun holders, and with the Wii Balance Board and the Wii Wheel, there would be too many peripherals, so Mr. Miyamoto felt they needed to unify all gun holders into one.
 
The very first design was made by joining a Wii Remote and a Nunchuck with wires and rubber bands. During the development of Twilight Princess, one of the staff members showed it to me, and it actually felt nice. There were many prototypes, but they finally got to the final version, which stores the Nunchuck cable by request of Mr. Miyamoto. The name, Wii Zapper, comes from the old NES Zapper, as it has a wider meaning than a simple gun.
 
However, someone from the Zelda team noticed Link didn't use any gun-like weapons. Using the Wii Zapper in Animal Crossing wouldn't be possible, and a Mario FPS would be weird. This project was born from the Zelda team, so they decided to keep going with that franchise. After rejecting a Terminator-like idea, they remembered the shooting stage in Old Kakariko, so they decided to give Link a crossbow.
 
Finally, Mr. Miyamoto asks people to try this game with the Wii Zapper and have fun.