It’s a big week for Nintendo Switch gamers, as The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom will arrive, granting them an all-new adventure out in Hyrule for them to enjoy. Numerous elements to this game are special, including Princess Zelda being the protagonist, all-new abilities to try, and a sense that the player’s creativity is being put at the forefront of the game’s mechanics. To explain some of this, Nintendo brought in Producer Eiji Aonuma, Director Tomomi Sano, and designer Satoshi Terada for a special “Ask The Developer” chat where they broke down many elements of the game.
For example, with Sano, she is the first female director in the franchise’s history, which is quite an honor. However, due to her work at Grezzo, she’s worked on plenty of other series titles in the past, including other games that were made for Switch. Due to Grezzo proving themselves via past remasters and remakes, Eiji Aonuma and Nintendo granted them the ability to pitch them something new, and as Terada noted, it was something they really took to:
“After all the remakes we had been working on, this was the first time we were challenged with a new game project from the conceptual stage. There was even a time when every single one of Grezzo’s employees was thinking about ideas. Thanks to this, we came up with so many ideas that it took us three days just to go over and review them.”
Sano added:
“Dozens of people participated, and even though they didn’t brainstorm together or anything like that, surprisingly a number of similar ideas were proposed.”
Aonuma then took many of those concepts and worked with them to make something that had a lot of “freedom” within it and would stand out from other titles in the series. However, things didn’t immediately shift to being toward the “Echoes” as we’ve seen in the trailers.
Instead, The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom was almost about creating dungeons! This mechanic was featured in a previous Grezzo remake but on a much smaller scale. However, as time went on, and they did the true “Echoes” versus the dungeon editing, things got more fun in Sano’s eyes:
“I thought to myself, “Wow, I never knew this was possible.” Of course, creating dungeons was fun, but being able to copy various objects and use them in different places was even more fun.”
That was clearly the right decision, as many are hyped about how far they can take the Echoes in exploring Hyrule and defeating enemies.
