The iconic fairy companion from Zelda sidekicks more annoying than Navi, but Link's companion throughout the entirety of Ocarina has a decades-spanning reputation for getting on players' nerves. Navi serves a narrative purpose at the game's outset, and she is integral to the gameplay at large, but her character almost ended up on the cutting room floor.
With the games industry transitioning to 3D during the Nintendo 64 era, Ocarina of Time's Z-targeting system was revolutionary for third-person action games. Aside from waking Link and directing him to the Great Deku Tree, Navi was most often seen floating above whatever the player locked onto. Her other primary function was to supply the player with hints throughout the game. The famed producer of Ocarina of Time, Shigeru Miyamoto, didn't like Navi's hint system, and confessed to wanting to remove that mechanic from the game altogether.
This information comes from a 1999 interview with Miyamoto that appeared in a Japanese Ocarina of Time strategy guide. It was recently translated by shmuplations, a repository of old Japanese game developer interviews. Conducted roughly a year after Ocarina of Time's release, Miyamoto discusses a wide range of topics, including some cut content, how the game was viewed as part of the Zelda timeline at that point, and his personal thoughts on the game's difficulty.
Miyamoto Considered Navi Ocarina Of Time's Weak Point
With Ocarina of Time broaching the games industry's new territory of three dimensions, Navi was added as a way to help players navigate the game world, but Miyamoto didn't view the final system as satisfactory. He raised the issue of trying to have the game give advice based on individual players' unique situations, noting developers would "have to spend the same amount of time as [they] would developing an entire game" to get it right. There were many features cut from the game, including working portals in an Ocarina tech demo, but Navi was apparently useful enough to keep around.
Miyamoto and the other developers didn't want to make Navi too useful, though, since making her hints more sophisticated might have ironically shown how unintuitive the whole system actually is. According to Miyamoto, Navi's dialogue is purposefully repetitive, and wasn't meant to be used every step of the way. He envisioned Navi being most useful to "players who stop playing for a month or so, who then pick the game back up and want to what they were supposed to do." It's interesting that with a game as revolutionary as Ocarina of Time, Miyamoto wanted it to be even more inventive than it already was. Navi's character and her constant offering of tips is now inextricable from Link in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but she was apparently very close to having an even lesser role.
Source: shmuplations
