One of the neatest features of Breath of the Wild is the Champion abilities. Upon freeing a Divine Beast, that beast’s champion grants you a power that improves Link’s combat, traversal, or survival abilities. It might surprise you that the concept of Link gaining abilities connected to important characters wasn’t new. Turns out, about 20 years earlier, during the development of Ocarina of Time, it was planned that Link would be able to gain abilities connected to the Six Sages through the use of their Medallions. That’s right, at one point the Sage Medallions had a use beyond looking pretty in menus!
In a 1997 interview for Japanese publication Famimanga 64 during Ocarina of Time’s development (which has been archived at IGN), Shigeru Miyamoto stated that each of the six Medallions would give Link a magic spell that he could use, each being a different element “including fire, wind, darkness, and light.” He went on to say that they also could be used in conjunction with the bow for magic arrows and that at the time he was considering allowing the player to combine medallions for different effects. While that particular idea was left on the cutting room floor, the others would be echoed in the final release of the game, with the three types of magic arrows and the three Great Fairy spells. However, the full extent to what the medallions would have been capable of was only up to speculation for several years.
That would change when a prototype of Ocarina of Time was leaked online in 2020. Among the plethora of beta assets dataminers were able to find was model data for three of the spells but none of the actual code. Using these findings, along with other pre-release material such as the interview above, one could deduce the function of five of the six spells. The final piece of the puzzle arrived in January of last year when another early build was found. This time, they were able to find text descriptions of each of the medallions, including the elusive sixth.
The Wind Medallion (which would become the Forest Medallion) and the Fire Medallion’s spells would both survive to the final game, as their abilities correlate to Farore’s Wind and Din’s Fire, respectively. The Shadow Medallion surrounded you in a darkness that made you invisible to enemies (possibly similar to how the Stone Mask works in Majora’s Mask) and this idea would eventually be workshopped into Nayru’s Love, which rounds out the trio.
The Light Medallion was an attack spell similar to Light Arrows, although with greater range. As mentioned earlier, it was planned for the Medallions to work with the bow, so it’s very possible that the Fire Medallion would be able to create Fire Arrows, and the Water Medallion would grant Ice Arrows. It does make you wonder what the other types of arrows would do, but I’m afraid that is beyond the scope of my research.
Speaking of the Water Medallion: At this stage of development it was referred to as the Ice Medallion, and had the ability to summon pillars of ice that could damage enemies and put out fires. Though it’s mostly conjecture on my part, there is a noticeable similarity between this and the Cryonis Rune from Breath of the Wild. That said, the Ice Medallion seems to be more attack focused, while Cryonis is about traversal.
The last medallion, the Spirit Medallion, was the one that remained a mystery the longest. But with the leak, it was revealed that the spell would have had the most interesting use: It allowed Link to turn into Navi! The concept may hearken back to the Fairy spell from The Adventure of Link, which allowed Link to fly to hard-to-reach spaces. It may also have sparked the idea of using Hyoi Pears and the Command Melody to control various entities in The Wind Waker.
While it’s a sad fate that the Sage Medallions ended up as mere colorful knick-knacks that tracked your progress through the game, they still left a large impact on the Zelda series’ design throughout its history. And it’s thanks to the dataminers and preservationists that were able to find these gems hidden in Ocarina’s past. To give you a taste of what could have been, I shall leave you with a re-creation of a few of the old Medallion spells by user MrCheeze, as well as this Twitter thread documenting their findings for further reading.
