For three consecutive days, Monolith Soft will publish one interview per day regarding their Zelda collaboration with Nintendo. The first interview is out today, regarding the character art and modeling of NPCs, enemies, creatures, and weapons in Tears of the Kingdom.
- A few highlights:
- They want Ganondorf to look not just strong and evil, but with a mysterious allure. (thirst trap?)
- A character’s design needs to also convey gameplay information, such as obtainable materials after defeated.
- There are ~120k possible combinations of weapons + materials.
- Video calls btw the two companies had hundreds of participants.
- Even modelers were “deeply involved” in all aspects of development, from ideation to debugging.
Note that these Zelda webpages are for recruiting purposes (images below). They might not be hints of any upcoming games.
Update 1: The second Monolith Soft interview with the TotK team is up. The subject is programming.
Update 2: Monolith Soft published the 3rd interview with their Zelda TotK team; this time about animation. It’s said that the collaboration began before the game’s direction was finalized, therefore the Monolith team helped brainstorming ideas such as NPCs rebuilding Hyrule and fighting monsters. I hope this settles some fan debates regarding the extent of Monolith’s involvement?
Related post: Monolith Soft’s Work on Zelda Series
[Originally posted on 2026-04-05 to -07 Pacific Time]
