Eiji Aonuma is apparently a big fan of voice acting and creates a deeper connection with the characters that are voiced. It’s something he and his team have contemplated adding into Zelda games in the past, but they ultimately opted to not do so. Breath of the Wild has voice acting, but why did they decide to do that now when they didn’t in the past? Eiji Aonuma elaborated on this while being very careful to skirt away from spoilers in a recent interview with Waypoint.

There’s voice acting in Breath of the Wild, for the first time in the Zelda series. Is that something you’d considered introducing before now? And personally, in other games you play, do you find that you develop a better connection with games characters when they are voiced?

Eiji Aonuma: I definitely feel that, when you’re playing a game, if a character actually speaks to you, with a voice, then you do have a deeper connection with them. You get a clearer sense of who that character is, and what they’re all about.

In terms of whether or not we’d considered using voice acting in the past, we definitely have thought about it. We weren’t able to do it, though. This time, we could. Now, why we could this time, but not before, is to do with a certain system we’ve used in the game. But I can’t really tell you any more about what that system is, because it’d kind of be giving too much away about the game. You’ll just have to play it, and see how the voice acting fits in for yourself.