information:filtering, linguistic:paraphrasing
Development philosophy

People have paid me a lot of lip service, calling me a genius story teller or a talented animator, and have gone so far as to suggest that I try my hand at movies, since my style of game design is, in their words, quite similar to making movies. But I feel that I am not a movie maker, but rather that my strength lies in my pioneering spirit to make use of technology to create the best, interactive commodities possible, and use that interactivity to give users a game they can enjoy and play comfortably.

Miyamoto, and Nintendo as a whole, do not use focus groups. Instead, Miyamoto figures out if a game is fun for himself. He says that if he enjoys it, others will too. He elaborates, citing the conception of the Pokémon series as an example, "And that's the point – Not to make something sell, something very popular, but to love something, and make something that we creators can love. It's the very core feeling we should have in making games." Miyamoto wants players to experience kyokan; he wants "the players to feel about the game what the developers felt themselves."

He then tests it with friends and family. He encourages younger developers to consider people who are new to gaming, for example by having them switch their dominant hand with their other hand to feel the experience of an unfamiliar game.

Miyamoto's philosophy does not focus on hyper-realistic graphics, although he realizes they have their place. He is more focused on the game mechanics, such as the choices and challenges in the game. Similar to how manga artists subverted their genre, Miyamoto hopes to subvert some of the basic principles he had popularized in his early games, retaining some elements but eliminating others.

His game design philosophy typically prioritizes gameplay over storytelling. In a 1992 interview, he said "the important thing is that it feels good when you're playing it" and "that quality is not determined by the story, but by the controls, the sound, and the rhythm and pacing". However, he requires a "compatibility the story and gameplay a good story can smooth over that discrepancy and make it all feel natural".

His use of real-time rendered cinematics (not prerendered video) serves both his own rapidly interactive development process with no rendering delays, and the player's interaction with the game's continuity. He prefers to change his games right until they are finalized, and to make "something unique and unprecedented". He prefers the game to be interactively fun rather than have elaborate film sequences, stating in 1999, "I will never make movie-like games"; therefore, the more than 90 total minutes of short cutscenes interspersed throughout Ocarina of Time deliver more interactive cinematic qualities. His vision mandates a rapid and malleable development process with small teams, as when he directed substantial changes to the overall game scenario in the final months of the development of Ocarina of Time. He said, "The reason behind using such a simple process, as I am sure you have all experienced in the workshop, is that there is a total limit on team energy. There is a limit to the work a team can do, and there is a limit to my own energy. We opted not to use that limited time and energy on pre-rendered images for use in cinema scenes, but rather on tests on other inter-active elements and polishing up the game".

For these reasons, he opposes prerendered cutscenes. Of Ocarina of Time, he says "we were able to make use of truly cinematic methods with our camera work without relying on."

Miyamoto has occasionally been critical of the role-playing game (RPG) genre. In a 1992 interview, when asked whether Zelda is an RPG series, he declined but classified it as "a real-time adventure"; he said he was "not interested in decided by stats and numbers as much of that 'live' feeling as possible", which he said " action games are better suited in conveying". In 2003, he described his "fundamental dislike" of the RPG genre: "I think that with an RPG you are completely bound hand and foot, and can't move. But gradually you become able to move your hands and legs... you become slightly untied. And in the end, you feel powerful. So what you get out of an RPG is a feeling of happiness. But I don't think they're something that's fundamentally fun to play. With a game like that, anyone can become really good at it. With Mario though, if you're not good at it, you may never get good." While critical of the RPG gameplay system, he has occasionally praised certain aspects of RPGs, such as Yuji Horii 's writing in the Dragon Quest series, the "interactive cinematic approach" of the Final Fantasy series, and Shigesato Itoi 's dialogue in the Mother series.