You’d have to be some kind of industry legend to start a studio, make one moderately successful WiiWare game and right afterwards have Nintendo offer you the job of porting what is widely considered the best video game in existence to their brand-spanking new platform. Luckily, Koichi Ishii, Secret of Mana director and Final Fantasy alum, qualifies.
Grezzo Games, developer of Line Attack Heroes, have been tasked with making the Ocarina sing on the Nintendo 3DS and from what we’ve seen so far, are doing a fair job of it. Nintendo isn’t forthcoming on the reason it chose to hand off development of the crucial title to an external developer, but this at least explains the delay.
Nintendo hasn’t handled portable Zelda development externally since the days of the GBA, but considering that Capcom came through with Minish Cap, we have to wonder. Were they busy this time around?