Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto has admitted to disliking Navi, calling Ocarina of Time’s fairy companion the “biggest weakpoint” of the game.
The comments come from a 1999 interview with Miyamoto originally printed in a Japanese strategy guide and now published online.
Commenting on the difficulty of the puzzles, Miyamoto admitted that the Navi hint system is “a little too unfriendly”, though pursuing perfection in a hint system would drive the developers into a hole.
“If you read Navi’s text, she says the same things over and over. I know it makes it sound bad, but we purposely left her at a kind of ‘stupid’ level,” said Miyamoto.
“I think if we’d tried to make Navi’s hints more sophisticated, that ‘stupidity’ would have actually stood out even more. The truth is I wanted to remove the entire system, but that would have been even more unfriendly to players.”