Shigeru Miyamoto doesn’t have the same level of involvement that he used in Mario game development, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t involved at all. He will play around 30 minutes of new Mario games that are in-development to ensure they stick true to the red plumber.
Miyamoto explains in an interview with Japanese design and architecture magazine Casa Brutus (via VGC) that he has people he trust to “maintain the world of Mario,” but he will always step in to check the interface and make sure it fits the character.
“Nowadays, I have teammates who help maintain the world of Mario, so I entrust much of it to them. Even so, I always personally play through about the first 30 minutes of the game and check the interface thoroughly — to make sure it really feels like Mario.”
This sort of thing explains previous instances of him taking a bit of time to just mess around. He’s dug around one spot for a while in Donkey Kong Bananza, for example, and going a bit further back, he “spent about an hour just climbing trees” when testing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
