Zelda wasn’t always the main character The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. At first, Nintendo thought it would be Link. The original idea for the game sounded very similar Mario Creatorand Link was copying and pasting items into Hyrule — but his sword and shield kept getting in the way, according to Echoes of wisdom programmers Eiji Aonuma, Tomomi Sano and Satoshi Terada. As part of Nintendo’s “Ask a Developer” SeriesAonuma, Sano, and Terada took part in an interview where they talked about Echoes of wisdom ahead of its September 26 release date. Three installments have been released so far, with the latest one featuring Zelda as the game’s star.
The first idea was to apply Link without a sword and shield to encourage players to apply echoes, a core gameplay mechanic in Echoes of wisdom. Later, Link got his sword and shield back. “But even then, we thought that once they got the sword and shield, they would stop using echoes,” said Terada, a director at Grezzo, a Nintendo partner developer Echoes of wisdom“It’s just a typical Legend of Zelda game. What are we going to do?” added Aonuma, a longtime Zelda producer and senior officer at Nintendo EPD, an in-house developer.
Ultimately, they decided to make Zelda the protagonist, since she doesn’t apply a sword or shield. But this would be Zelda’s first real foray into the franchise, so it had to make sense. The team thought of everything, down to Zelda’s outfit, but nothing seemed to fit, aside from her iconic dress — with the addition of Link’s hood. It all came down to finding a narrative reason for Zelda to face the evil that threatens Hyrule; since she’s a royal, it’s not like she’d be going out to face the everyday monsters that Link usually deals with, Aonuma said.
“So we ultimately decided that the setting for this game would involve a lot of large, mysterious rifts appearing in Hyrule,” Aonuma said. “We had to come up with something that wasn’t a monster, but something that would make the princess think, ‘This is bad! I have to do something!’ The princess is the daughter of the rulers of the country. So I thought the motivation for the fight was the world of Hyrule being destroyed and changed.”
Returning to Zelda’s outfit; Nintendo and Grezzo thought it would be odd for Zelda to have a completely up-to-date adventurer’s outfit ready, as if she knew she was going to set off. She didn’t, so she wore a pink dress, topped with Link’s hood as a visual reminder of her mission to save Link and Hyrule.
Echoes of wisdom sounds like it was a challenge to build around, which led to a lot of questions. “While creating the initial world was difficult, we also thought about what role Link would play in the game,” Terada said. “What would happen to the sword if the gameplay focused on the echoes? Could this character even exist in this game? The Legend of Zelda series has a great history. How do I put this? How deep into the story of The Legend of Zelda should we go?”
According to game director Sano, Nintendo held “boot camps” that added nine days to the game’s total development time, with work on the story from morning until night.
“Even with this title, we didn’t intend to create any new theories in the history of the series,” Aonuma said. “Link always goes on an adventure and experiences a lot of things. But Princess Zelda always had to go back in the Legend of Zelda series. But this time, Princess Zelda goes on her own adventure, so the story takes a different perspective than before. I think that’s why we were able to create something new in terms of the story as well.”
