The remake of the acclaimed The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is now out on Switch, and it looks to be doing well. Despite some nagging technical issues here and there, the game is probably the biggest Nintendo launch of the year, and it’s cute and unique art style wiggles its way into your heart. It recreates the original Game Boy game well, with some new material added. One of those additions was the Chamber Dungeon mode, where you can create your own dungeons. That mode was actually born from a much grander idea however.
While speaking with IGN, Series Producer Eiji Aonuma said that he had conversations with Shigeru Miyamoto about creating a Legend of Zelda Maker similar to Super Mario Maker. Despite Aonuma feeling a Maker game for Zelda would probably be too complex, those discussions lead to the more straightforward idea of the mode in Link’s Awakening.
“So we gave some thought into a more approachable style of play where you have to think about how to arrange parts that already have a solution to create a single dungeon, instead of allowing players to create complex arrangements like in Super Mario Maker 2, and that’s how we created the Chamber Dungeons for this game.”
The Chamber Dungeons are a fun, if very simple, creator. Hopefully, down the line we will get a Zelda Maker of some kind to create our own little mini-Zeldas. For now, though, we have to settle for the great games in the series like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which is available now.