I’m shocked!
When Nintendo first showed off the “Chamber Dungeon” mode in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, many people said it looked like a potential Zelda Maker game. As it would happen to be, the idea for the mode’s inclusion came from just that. In a new interview with IGN, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma stated that the remake’s new mode was inspired by Miyamoto asking Aonuma to include Mario Maker-like features in a new Zelda game.
As Aonuma recalls, “I talk to Mr. Miyamoto regularly about ‘the next Zelda game,’ and one time, he asked me if I could come up with a game that features Super Mario Maker-like gameplay, but for Zelda. We talked about how a game like this for Zelda would have dungeons, but it’s generally quite difficult to devise the logic needed to solve them.” That last part is important because the mode in-game is rather simplistic.
Due to the lack of complexity, it became necessary to strip back the features that Chamber Dungeons had. “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,” Aonuma explained.
Link’s Awakening was chosen to debut the mode since its dungeons had rooms that mostly fit onto a single screen. The limitations of the Game Boy forced Nintendo to craft smaller scale dungeons, even if their complexity rivaled that of past entries. Chamber Dungeons don’t offer nearly the same depth, but the smaller size does mean you can plop rooms around in an efficient manner. “A critical part of the Chamber Dungeon gameplay is understanding the original dungeons before arranging your own.”
I’m honestly not that surprised at this confirmation. It was pretty evident that Super Mario Maker served some inspiration to this mode. I do wish it had the same options as the former game, but Chamber Dungeons are a fun enough distraction. Maybe in the next Zelda, we can see the feature expanded greatly.
