ONM Remembered – #224
“Mario won’t get older, and he won’t start doing rude stuff!”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 122 (November 2002)
More questions for Shiggy from the British readers of ONM!
There’s not many questions to get excited about this time, partly because the answers are so unsatisfying – what, Miyamoto can’t tell people what the GameCube controller is like a year after its release?! (I had to look it up and make sure I hadn’t put the wrong date on this issue!) And the answer about Ganon’s inspiration seems to be retelling the backstory of Ocarina of Time before realising, crap, that’s not what was being asked. In the column’s defence, there’s probably a long gap between when the letters were sent, translated, answered and the answers translated, before being printed.
If there’s good answer to be found, it’s almost cute that Miyamoto says he passed the letter asking for a new Metroid game on to management. It could be a polite way of saying he dunked that junk in the trash can, but it always suggests that your totey little voice asking for new instalments of your favourite franchises might actually mean something to a giant mega-corporation.
Miyamoto also answers the question on everybody’s minds from the moment he mentioned it: what did he mean by Mario becoming more mature? Why, better graphics, of course! That way he can appeal to a wider audience!
…
Y’know, sometimes fessing up that it was a dodgy translation makes for a more satisfying answer.
I was actually about to theorise that he meant the inclusion of a larger, ongoing storyline in Super Mario Sunshine, something I assume was meant to make it feel like a more engaging experience to make the player connect to Mario and his predicament. Instead it’s just one reason of many I will never make a new save file in it. There’s like twenty minutes of unskippable cutscenes at the start of that game!
