The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD took six months to develop

Recently released Wii U remastering The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD took Nintendo six months to develop, series producer Eiji Aonuma has said.

In an interview with 4Gamer (translated by Siliconera), Aonuma added that updating the 2003 original was still challenging. “Development was still difficult,” he said. “You had to consider the difference in hardware at the time.”

“Additionally there is a technique known as toon shading, which gives the game a very animated look. At that time, the technique was established, but had not be used before by our staff, everyone had to do everything by hand,” he added.

Updating the game to 16:9 on Wii U also required certain scenes to be changed manually in order to look right in the final release of The Wind Waker HD. “For dramatic purposes, we would have characters we didn’t want in the frame, out of sight, but on the 16:9 ratio, you could still see those characters,” Aonuma said.

Nintendo released a disc-based edition of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD on October 4. For more information on the game, check out GameSpot's review.