Navi

is a fictional fairy who acts as series protagonist Link's navigator throughout the 1998 Nintendo 64 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. She was voiced by Kaori Mizuhashi. Navi performs a variety of functions within the game, including being a companion and guide to Link, providing the player with advice and being a focal point for the game's Z-lock targeting combat system. She has been widely criticised by players and critics for her repetitive interruptions in gameplay, particularly with the prompt "Hey! Listen!". Concept and creation Navi was originally created as a marker for targeting an opponent in battle. Game designer Yoshiaki Koizumi stated in an interview that he wanted to use something more than a simple triangular marker, so he came up with the idea of a fairy. However, due to the limitations of the Nintendo 64, he created the fairy as a ball of light with wings. He named it the "Fairy Navigation System", which led to the character being named Navi, from "navigation". He commented: "I thought, 'This is Navi' and ideas started coming to me one after the other. Like being able to tell by colour whether the person you're facing is good or bad, and if Navi talked, she could be an important guide for the story. So naming the system Navi really helped it grow". Navi was designed as the focal point of the game's Z-lock targeting system, which gives the player the ability to combat more than one enemy at a time by locking on to them using the Z, L, or ZL buttons on the gamepad. Using this system, Link is able to move freely around the enemy's fixed position, with Navi allowing the camera to follow his movements. Shigeru Miyamoto explained in a strategy guide published by Japanese magazine Famitsu in April 1999 that Navi had been purposefully designed to provide simple advice, due to limited developer time and manpower. This resulted in Navi repeating the same advice throughout the game, which became the main reason for players branding the character as annoying. Miyamoto also considered that Navi's advice was a major weakness of Ocarina of Time: "The truth is I wanted to remove the entire system, but that would have been even more unfriendly to players. You can think of Navi as being there for players who stop playing for a month or so, who then pick the game back up and want to remember what they were supposed to do". Various concepts were developed for Ocarina of Time and later abandoned.