The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom devs reveal why they built the game around “being mischievous”  

Releasing today, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is the latest game in Nintendo’s beloved Zelda series. Co-developed by Nintendo and Grezzo, the game is the first to have Princess Zelda as the main character instead of Link. In an interview posted on Nintendo’s official website, Echoes of Wisdom’s creators recently revealed why “being mischievous” was a core concept for the game, and how this ties into the high degree of freedom of recent hit titles in the series like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. 

In Echoes of Wisdom, Zelda cannot attack enemies directly with a sword like Link would. Instead, solving the game’s puzzles and dealing with enemies involves using ‘echoes’. These are imitations of monsters and objects that the player can learn and then use freely to progress through the game. Zelda can also bind monsters to her so that they mimic her movements.  

The director of the Nintendo side of the game, Tomomi Sano, emphasized the importance of balancing player freedom with accessible gameplay. “Having the freedom to solve puzzles by yourself is a key feature of Legend of Zelda games.” She explains. However, to avoid overwhelming the player, the devs strived to make the echoes distinctive and memorable. “We made a conscious effort to clearly define the functions of each echo so that players understand how and where they should be used.” At the same time, they also made sure the echoes would be snappy and spontaneous so that players wouldn’t feel like they were waiting around. 

However, it was not easy to implement the echo mechanic into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. As well as making sure everything looked right in the game’s top-down and side-views, “we also needed to consider all the different places where players might use these echoes,” Grezzo’s director of the game, Satoshi Terada comments.  

Although the team recounted that it was a lot of work to make sure the echoes would work everywhere and not break the game- they ended up gradually removing restrictions placed on the player as development progressed. “Over time, most of the restrictions we thought were necessary at the start of development were no longer needed,” series producer Eiji Aonuma explains.  

With Breath of the Wild’s free-form exploration and Tears of the Kingdom giving players the ability to build all kinds of crazy inventions, Zelda players have got used to having a high degree of freedom. To make sure that Echoes of Wisdom also gave players a similar feeling, the dev team made “being mischievous” their design motto. Aonuma explains that “We came up with this key phrase because we wanted to do some things that were really out there. For example, if you roll something like a spike roller along the ground, that’s a lot of work [for the devs], because it can hit all kinds of things, but if we didn’t allow for this possibility, it wouldn’t be fun.” 

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is out now on Nintendo Switch.