Takaya Imamura was embedded in Nintendo for over three decades – working as an art director and character designer for classics like Star Fox, F-Zero, and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – and he says the main thing he learned from the company was to push each game beyond the level of quality that almost any other company “would be satisfied with.”
Now that Imamura is an independent developer, who recently worked to adapt his own manga Omega 6 in game form, he looked back on his illustrious and still-ongoing career in an interview with former Nintendo Minute hosts Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang, explaining that Nintendo’s philosophy is “not so much about lowering the barrier for entry, so much as making a game that is enjoyable and can be enjoyed by anybody.”
The second key lesson he learned during his legendary 32-year run was about reaching a level of quality and polish that “pretty much anybody would be happy with,” before cranking everything up past the point of mere ‘good enough’ acceptability. “That was the kind of thing I learned at Nintendo,” he said, per a translator. “It’s not just, ‘this is the level anybody would be satisfied with.’ The Nintendo way is to take it that much further.”
Elsewhere in the interview, when talking about his approach to creating iconic characters, Imamura explained he likes to design by subtraction and is always looking at what he can remove. His character designs include everything from Captain Falcon, the Star Fox cast, and, err, Tingle, but Imamura says they were all made by focusing on what was “unneeded.”
For now, why not look to the future with everything we know about the Nintendo Switch 2 and all the upcoming Switch games you can play in the interim?