EGM: This is the first Teen-rated Zelda. It must have been tempting to just roll up your sleeves and make with the dick jokes.

BT: [Laughs] Well, we kind of reserve the toilet humor and fart jokes for the WarioWare series. I think it was pretty obvious once the graphical shift [to a more realistic-looking game] occurred that it would be difficult to get an E [for everyone] rating. But I don’t think that means we want to change the focus of the game, the core of what Zelda is and has been.

EGM: We can’t help but think how much better the game would look on the PS3 or 360. Wouldn’t that power help convey the story better?

BT: …I’d rather see Twilight Princess with the graphics it has—with the visual direction and the art direction that the art team has gone with— rather than a shiny bump-mapped [rendering technique to create realistic surfaces] Link face that’s reflecting light off it in all directions…. It’s a question of, if you’ve got a beefed-up, more powerful system, do you want to spend a lot of that processing power on creating…graphics, or do you want to take advantage of that power to create a better interactive experience? I think that with the Zelda team, they’re always going to choose to take advantage of this processor to do what we can to make the interactive experience better.

EGM: This game has more narrative than any other Zelda, yet Link remains the silent hero throughout. Do you think we’ll ever see a Zelda where Link speaks?

Full Interview