Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi franchise has never been shy about pulling from FromSoftware’s Dark Souls games but director Stig Asmussen has revealed The Legend of Zelda to be another inspiration.
Speaking to IGN for Podcast Beyond, Asmussen revealed that sequel Jedi: Survivor’s developers drew inspiration from Zelda games to create the myriad of puzzles for Cal Kestis and the player to overcome.
We had a lot of puzzles in the game and I would be lying if I didn’t say that we definitely drew inspiration from Zelda
“We had a lot of puzzles in the game and I would be lying if I didn’t say that we definitely drew inspiration from Zelda,” he said.
Asmussen explained that his team of level designers essentially had a toy box of different Force abilities and other mechanics to play with and create these puzzles from, keeping Zelda in mind as they did so.
“It’s all about creating these challenges for those who want to take part in [them],” he added. “We had kind of a clever wrapper, that these were old High Republic training centres. This is kind of their NASA pilot training abilities.”
Environmental puzzles are a big part of Jedi Survivor, and Cal frequently comes across areas that resemble the shrines in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. It’s just one of the many ways that Zelda has inspired action-adventure games in recent years.
Jedi: Survivor kept fans busy in plenty of other ways too, whether in obsessing over its new froggy character Turgle or wincing at the return of Jedi: Fallen Order’s most infamous foe.
In our 9/10 review, IGN said: “If Respawn makes a third game like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Fallen Order, it’ll complete the best Star Wars trilogy in 30 years, hands down.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.