Two new books look at Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto from two distinct angles, and the points at which they intersect illuminate one of the key paradoxes of Miyamoto's tenure as Nintendo's top game designer.
Shigeru Miyamoto, the first in a new series on game designers from Bloomsbury, is an overview of the creator of Super Mario et al. that digs into the literature and into the games to paint a multi-faceted picture of Miyamoto as designer that's accessible even to laypersons. Meanwhile, Legends of Localization: Book 1 is a detailed, nitty-gritty tooth-and-nail tearing apart of one of Miyamoto's breakout classics, The Legend of Zelda, that exposes the game's underpinnings by way of showing how the original Japanese version was localized into the American product that we outside Japan are best familiar with.
Although different in so many ways (the Bloomsbury book is a slim paperback by a media professor, the other a large-format, full-color, image-forward coffee table book by a professional game translator), the high-level overview of a life's oeuvre and the dizzyingly deep dive into a single work each has a lot to say about the other, and shed some light on Shigeru Miyamoto's odd relationship with narratives in videogames.
Donkey Kong, the first game directed by Miyamoto, is considered to be the first videogame that told a complete narrative story, using the elements on screen (as opposed to in an instruction manual) to set up a clear beginning, middle, and ending. In this way it was extremely influential, and yet immediately after revolutionizing game creation in this way, Miyamoto rejected this sort of approach; Super Mario Bros. a few years later was actually less narratively complex (in a traditional, linear storytelling sense) than Donkey Kong had been.
Fangamer
