A recent article from the Japanese Famitsu Magazine contains a fascinating interview with Koei Tecmo developers that revealed new insight into the development of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment. Koei Tecmo specializes in making the Dynasty Warriors franchise and other “Musou-like” games that feature tactical war strategy and defeating hundreds of enemies at once with exaggerated but entertaining move sets. But this time around, the KT team has employed their brand new branch AAA Studio to give the world of Tears of the Kingdom an extra special treatment. AAA Studio was founded in 2024 to address two main things: 1) the increasing demand on developers as games increase in complexity and 2) to produce “AAA quality” games, or games that would have a high quality blockbuster-like experience and feel.
In the article, Famitsu interviews Yosuke Hayashi, Vice President of Koei Tecmo Games and Director of AAA Studio, as well as Ryuta Matsushita, AAA Studio Producer, who previously produced Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and is the current Producer of Age of Imprisonment. The latter will be AAA Studio’s debut project. Age of Imprisonment was originally designed on the Nintendo Switch, but changed to the Switch 2 in the middle of development. In a rough English translation, Hayashi says, “just by replacing what I was creating until them on Nintendo Switch 2, the number of enemies and frame rates have changed significantly… The interest went up at once. It’s a point that surprised us that the fun has changed so much thanks to the hardware.”
Players have noted similar experiences when playing Age of Calamity on the Switch 2 shortly after the console was released on the market. Frame rates significantly improved along with certain graphical pain points even though the game operated in its native Switch state on Switch 2 hardware. Other Switch games such as Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have also inherently experienced the Switch 2 glow up treatment, and players are finding new ways to love their games again.
Matsushita stated that even though Age of Imprisonment is a fighting strategy game, the studio is striving for the game to honor the creative puzzle solving chiefly featured in Tears of the Kingdom’s gameplay so that “it can be played for a long time by game fans.” He also stated, “The fun of The Legend of Zelda is said to be room for ingenuity.” In essence, players might not have the full capacity of the Ultrahand ability, but they could encounter clever choices when facing a combat situation, such as choosing between using an item or an ally’s certain abilities to solve a specific problem, or capturing an enemy instead of defeating it. Matsushita reiterated that AAA Studio is working hard to honor the free spirit that Tears of the Kingdom has as much as possible.
Nintendo Prime covers translated sections of the Famitsu article as well as other Nintendo related topics in the YouTube video below:
