'We could have done more with Zelda II,' Miyamoto says

Shigeru Miyamoto has been making games at Nintendo for more than 30 years. In that time, he has directly overseen dozens of titles, from the landmark Super Mario Bros. to his latest pet project, Pikmin 3. But all those projects don't come without some missed opportunities.

"I wouldn't say that I've ever made a bad game, per se, but a game I think we could have done more with was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link," he told Kotaku.

The sidescrolling/RPG hybrid is a black sheep among the beloved Zelda series. Miyamoto says it never quite took on that vital life of its own.

"When we're designing games, we have our plan for what we're going to design but in our process it evolves and grows from there," Miyamoto said. "In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper."

He said hardware limitations were partly to blame: for example, a grating several-second pause when the game transitioned from the overworld to side scrolling segments nixed opportunities to blend the two.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is available on 3DS eShop if you want to see for yourself.