I'm more of a Midna stan, but there's no denying Navi from Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the series' most iconic ethereal companion, with her lovably nagging pleas to "hey, listen" still ringing through the Zelda pantheon after all these years. The original vision for the li'l fairy, however, was very different from the glowing orb with wings we know and love today, and it's only because of the technical limitations of the Nintendo 64 that she looks the way she does.
Nintendo veteran and Ocarina of Time designer Yoshiaki Koizumi revealed as much in an Iwata Asks Q&A from 2011, but with the upcoming remake renewing interest in the original game, the Kit & Krysta YouTube channel dug it up and it caught our attention here. I mean, can you imagine an Ocarina of Time where Link's companion is anything but a faceless glowing ball? According to Koizumi, Navi was originally supposed to be a human-like figure.
"Usually, if you were to make a fairy, you would make a cute girl, but that wasn't possible with the Nintendo 64 system, so I just made a ball of light with wings," Koizumi says.
This initial direction makes sense, since the previous, 2D games had shown fairies as girlish creatures in the style of Tinkerbell. I'm 100% guessing here, but it sounds like a human-like model would've been too much detail to cram into such a tiny character and still have animations and AI look half-decent.
Koizumi was a key architect behind Ocarina of Time's Z-targeting system, which uses Navi as a cursor instead of a traditional on-screen marker. In the same interview, he says Navi was born simply because he didn't want to use a generic marker.
"I was a designer, so I didn't want to use such a simple marker. I wanted to make something else, so I came up with a fairy. After all, it was The Legend of Zelda," he says.
It's both funny and disturbing to imagine Nintendo conjuring a more realistic female-presenting Navi for the Ocarina of Time remake, but thankfully pre-release footage has confirmed she's the same iridescent sphere as before but with fewer edges. Still, it's wild to think that almost certainly wouldn't be the case if the N64 had a few extra bits in its processor.
