One of the new features Nintendo have designed for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the ability to cook meals and have them give you different bonuses depending on the ingredients you used.
Given the Zelda team’s self-professed love for Monster Hunter, it’s easy to draw a connection between the way cooking works in that series and the cooking in Breath of the Wild. Nonetheless, while I do believe that Monster Hunter is one of the games that has influenced the new Zelda in a number of ways, this is a great time to remind people that series producer Eiji Aonuma first brought the idea of cooking up way back in 2004.
“To tell you the truth, I’ve been thinking for a long time about how I could work cooking into a game somehow. The fact of the matter is that cooking is actually, if you think about it, pretty boring. There’s not a lot you can really do—it’s slow work and there’s not a lot you can do to make it seem very exciting. I guess if you watch TV in the U.S., there’s a lot cooking shows and they somehow manage to make cooking seem exciting.
“So maybe if, going forward in the future, I can find a way to make cooking seem more exciting and allow people to have fun with it, then of course I would
probably try to put it into a game. Maybe if at some point down the road there is cooking in a game, you guys can all think back and think, “Hey, I bet Aonuma did this!” Then I’d be really happy.” - Eiji Aonuma, GDC 2004 Roundtable Q&A
Aonuma goes on to mention that he’s personally fond of cooking in real life, and does a little bit of it every other day or so. Sometimes, he even throws a curry parties upon the completion of a project.
I suspect what happened is that Aonuma intended to work cooking into a number of Zelda games, but never really got around to it, or never quite figured out just how he wanted to implement it. Given that he plays a lot of Monster Hunter, though, it’s possible those games eventually helped him decide what role he wanted cooking to play—especially since cooking in Zelda works in a very similar fashion.
Thanks to Nintendo World Report for the roundtable recording.
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