The director of the new Zelda title, Twilight Princess, chats about the challenges faced when making the game.

When you're making the next game in one of the most best-selling franchises ever, you need to make sure you do it right. Speaking on Twilight Princess, the director of the title Eiji Aonuma recently told Wired News that the game was carefully planned to appeal to all markets. "We had meetings early on with the North American localisation team to discuss things like character design, particularly with Link."

The level of detail in the game has risen dramatically with the more realistic graphics. "You can't fool the player any more," Aonuma says. Little things, he explained, needed to be changed, like it no longer working that a player swings a sword with their left hand and killing an enemy on his right.

"We're definitely seeing how hard it is to work with realistic graphics. If I'm showing something realistically, then I have to show the results in a realistic manner as well. You have to be able to feel the weight of Link's sword as he swings it."

Also mentioned was the issue of voice acting in the games, which other than the characters grunting, has never really been used in the series. Aonuma is in two minds on it, saying that "When the player is reading text on the screen, they're inserting a part of themselves, their imagination, into the reading... With fully spoken dialogue, everything about the character becomes fixed in place, and you lose a bit of that imaginative aspect."

However, he went on to say that if voice acting could be used in a way that's "new and unique," it would be very positive for the Zelda series. He said that this idea wasn't included in the E3 demo, but there was some ideas on the matter he was considering.

More Zelda news when it breaks, as we count down the months until the November release date.