The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is the first game to have Princess Zelda as the playable protagonist. Despite the series being supposedly about her legend, the hero has always been Link. In a Nintendo Ask the Developer interview published Tuesday, developers on the game at Grezzo explained why Link had to hit the sidelines.
While it was also just a matter of time for Zelda to star in her own game, the team also realized early on that if they wanted to go with the echoes concept — the ability to copy and paste objects into the world to use for puzzles and combat — Link couldn’t be the one with that ability. He already has a sword and shield, after all.
“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. There’s no need to rely on the monsters’ power, right?” Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma said. “If that’s the case, it must be someone who doesn’t fight with a sword and shield, right? Who in the series would be a good fit for these powers and bring their insight to them? Well, that would have to be Princess Zelda.”
Of course, there is also the matter of finding the right game to debut Zelda as the protagonist, something the team had looked into previously based on fan feedback.
“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!” Aonuma continued.
But Grezzo also had another question to answer: Why would Zelda leave her castle? She’s a princess and could just send people in her place if there was a fight. The team had to come up with a threat that was so vast and wasn’t just another monster so that Zelda would have to put herself in danger to save Hyrule itself. That’s how they came up with the rifts, which not only swallow the king, but Link, and keep opening around the kingdom. We won’t delve into the increasingly complicated Zelda lore, but there also had to be a goal that made sense with what had been established previously.
All this came from the third part of the interview series. On Monday, Nintendo published parts one and two, which revealed that Echoes of Wisdom started development as a dungeon editor where players could make their own Zelda levels (which we still want), and that it would be the first Zelda game with a female director, Tomomi Sano. Echoes of Wisdom is set to release on Nintendo Switch on September 26.