Today Nintendo released Part 3 of their interview with the team leaders behind Echoes of Wisdom’s development, which included Zelda mastermind Eiji Aonuma, Grezzo director Satoshi Terada, and Tomomi Sano, the first female director of a Legend of Zelda game. Part 3 covers the fascinating story of how Princess Zelda finally became the main protagonist in her own mainline game. Believe it or not, that wasn’t how the game’s concept initially started. Echoes of Wisdom was originally going to be a dungeon maker, and then a “mischievous” copy-paste adventure starring the hero Link.
“We were initially thinking that Link would be the protagonist. But when we focused on the gameplay using echoes and had Link copying and pasting things into the game field, the sword and shield got in the way. If you have a sword and a shield, you can just fight using those,” said Aonuma. “There’s no need to rely on the monsters’ power, right?”
“So, we thought, “What if players could use only echoes at first in order to understand the gameplay, and then as the game progresses, they get the sword and shield?” “But even then, we thought that once they got the sword and shield, they would stop using echoes,” Terada chimed in. “That’s just your typical Legend of Zelda game,” Aonuma laughed. “What are we going to do?”
As development progressed, the developers realized they would have to choose between the echoes and the swordplay in order for this Zelda game to be relevant. The echoes were a creative but indirect combat style, a style that would require wit and insight to be successful. A lightbulb went off. Aonuma realized that style would fit the wise Princess Zelda perfectly.
A Legend that finally stars its namesake
This isn’t the first time Eiji Aonuma ruminated over making Princess Zelda the main protagonist. When Breath of the Wild was revealed at E3 in 2016, Link’s long hair, small nose and soft face left many people to believe he was a girl. Aonuma’s ambiguous comment about Link’s gender-neutral design unfortunately didn’t help matters. He later clarified with an apology for the confusion, but confirmed that Nintendo staff had definitely “thought about” a female version of Link, but later “decided that if we’re going to have a female protagonist it’s simpler to have Princess Zelda as the main character.”
Despite Princess Zelda having the spotlight for much of Breath of the Wild, the open world game already brought so many changes to the table that Aonuma explained it simply wasn’t the right place and time for her to become the playable hero. “If we have Princess Zelda as the main character who fights, then what is Link going to do? Taking into account that, and also the idea of the balance of the Triforce, we thought it best to come back to this [original] makeup,” said Aonuma to Gamespot in the summer of 2016. Now that we look back on it, this logic made sense. If Princess Zelda could do it all, why even bother having Link around to protect her?
But even with this in mind, nabbing the chance to finally make the Legend’s namesake the hero of her story still percolated in the back of Aonuma’s mind.
“Over the years we’ve been working on the Legend of Zelda series, many people have often asked us, “Will Princess Zelda ever be the protagonist?” and said, “I’d like to play as Princess Zelda. When asked this question, I’ve always thought, “Of course, as long as it makes sense for the game and does justice to her as a character to be the protagonist,” and answered that way,” said Aonuma in Nintendo’s Echoes of Wisdom interview. “I had been trying in vain to figure out what would really do justice to her. But when I saw the team struggling to identify the ideal protagonist for this game, I thought, this is exactly the game for her!”
The team then further explained how the story in Echoes of Wisdom came to be, which is incredibly fascinating in itself. Many intricate details were fleshed out, right down to Zelda’s outfit. They eventually settled on her cloak – Link’s cloak, who is surprisingly a well-seasoned hero by the beginning of this game. Sano added they “thought it’d be touching if Princess Zelda inherited the hood that Link wore.”
The birth of a new kind of Zelda adventure
Aonuma admitted in the interview that “it was difficult to find a motive to send Princess Zelda on an adventure” if there were simply monsters swarming Hyrule. There’d be no reason for royalty to leave a castle if they are surrounded by a stronghold of people protecting them. “We tried brainstorming all sorts of ideas for what kind of situation would necessitate that the princess take matters into her own hands,” said Aonuma. Thus, the idea of mysterious rifts swallowing parts of the kingdom was born – along with a slew of other tough questions.
Puzzled by their own yarn they were weaving, the Echoes of Wisdom developers took it upon themselves to hide away in a writers’ retreat ‘boot camp’ and finish hashing out the game concepts for nine days straight in the summer of 2023, just months after Breath of the Wild’s hit sequel Tears of the Kingdom was released worldwide. “Even there, Grezzo didn’t offer any in-depth suggestions about the story at first. So, I went back to the hotel, quickly wrote a script that would work, and brought it with me the next day,” said Aonuma. “Then, we all contributed various elements that often occur in the Legend of Zelda series to the script. Using this method, we eventually completed the game’s story. These days, even for us, it’s not easy to touch on the lore of the Legend of Zelda series.”
“Over a few sessions, we spent nine days at the boot camps in total, working from morning until night,” Sano laughed. “We also had a hard time developing the scene in which the king is swallowed by a rift, which is one of Princess Zelda’s biggest motivations for setting out on her journey.”
The entirety of Part 3 of Nintendo’s “Ask the Developer” interview on Echoes of Wisdom can be found here, as well as Parts 1 and 2. Part 4 will be released tomorrow. The interview is available in both Japanese and English.
