Koei Tecmo details playable character selection process for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

Here we bring you more interesting details related to the development of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, one of Nintendo Switch’s most high-profile games. These again come from Dengeki Online’s recent meeting with the game’s producers, Yosuke Hayashi and Masaki Furusawa, and director Ryota Matsushita.

This time, the statements below focus on a very tricky aspect of the game: how the title’s cast of playable characters was chosen. As you know, this one is quite peculiar and caused all sorts of reactions when it was leaked/confirmed.

Here’s what they had to say about it:

In addition to the main character, you can play with surprising characters, how were the playable characters selected?

Matsushita: First of all, we were aware of several things: meeting expectations, betraying expectations in some way, and exceeding expectations. It’s a great reward to be able to play the characters as warriors, and I think it’s fun. They had to be surprising and the next battle had to be exciting. However, I don’t think it’s an unexpected character selection, especially if you played Breath of the Wild.

Hayashi: It was a process of selecting playable characters. I thought about which character to include and when to put them in the story to make them a hook. I think it was surprising because I put them in an order that players didn’t expect.

Furusawa: Those who played Breath of the Wild to some extent would have imagined that “this character could be used…”. I think they were about 80% right. However, when we think about what happens during the adventure, we have to innovate. That was the goal of our work.

Along with this, they also added that the characters they had the hardest time developing were Princess Zelda and the Divine Beasts.

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