Hyrule Warriors originally much closer to a traditional Zelda game

Hyrule Warriors was originally designed to be much more like a traditional Zelda game experience, Nintendo has revealed.

The game would have featured a specific set of characters and limited boss battles to taking place within dungeons rather than in the general overworld, Zelda series boss Eiji Aonuma explained to Nintendo Life.

But Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto had other ideas - namely, that the game should be much closer to the original Dynasty Warriors series, on which Hyrule Warriors is based.

"At first, when Hayashi-san approached me, he wanted to make this title closer to a Zelda game than a Dynasty Warriors game," Aonuma explained. "However, Mr. Miyamoto came along and up-ended the tea table, saying, 'No, that should not be the case. What we're doing here is grafting Zelda onto the Dynasty Warriors experience.'

"It was a reversal of the original proposal from Hayashi-san, which was adding elements of Dynasty Warriors onto the Zelda franchise. It ended up being the other way around based on Miyamoto's direction."

That said, specific elements were kept within the game to make sure the experience still felt familiar to Zelda fans.

"One of the things that I think is required by a Zelda game is, for example, the loading scenes, which we kept - like the first scene where you come upon a treasure box and you have Link, or whoever, lifting the item up from the treasure box," Aonuma added.

"But we realised we needed more than just that, so we ended up adding more and more aspects that were Zelda-esque - for example, the sound effects and animations that people are familiar with from the franchise."

In recent years Miyamoto has taken on a more senior role at Nintendo, although still oversees development on a wide range of titles. He is also working on three smaller projects - the tower defense title Project Guard, the mech building and fighting title Project Giant Robot and a new Star Fox aerial shooter.