When you continue a franchise for a long time, and you have certain “story elements” that continue for that entire run, the idea of “changing things” can be a bit tricky. After all, the gamers who helped make the series a success have a picture in their minds about how things should go, sound, play, look, etc. If you were to completely change things, it might perturb players and lead to them not buying the game. In The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom, there were numerous changes to the classic game formula that many people welcomed. However, there was one that even Nintendo was hesitant about doing.
That change was to have Link talk. You see, throughout the franchise’s history, Link doesn’t truly talk. He shouts, makes gestures, and, in more recent games, has done a kind of pantomime talking where we see him “talking,” but we never hear what he says. Instead, the character he’s talking to just repeats what he “said.”
In an interview with Famitsu, Producer Eiji Aonuma noted that initially, they were going to have Link talk, but it just “didn’t feel right” to the team:
“It felt really strange. Nobody knew what Link would say – that’s only natural, because he’s never spoken before. So we had to come up with a setting where he couldn’t speak, and that’s how we came up with part of the story.”
As we would find out in the title, Link was on an adventure for quite some time before risking it all to save Princess Zelda, which led to her taking over his role as the hero. In that journey, he was taken to the Still World and was able to rescue other kids who had been lost within it. The cost of this, though, was that all of them were affected by the Still World in different ways, and Link was left without his voice. A simple measure to keep him quiet, but it worked!
Elsewhere, Aonuma noted that The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom was meant to be a title that everyone could finish:
“We design the whole game so that players can reach the final goal and watch the ending, so it’s a shame when they give up halfway through and can’t go on because they’re discouraged. In that sense, I think this time we’ve finally made a game where everyone can reach the goal.”
Given that over 2.5 million people have gotten the game by this point, we’re sure that many have indeed reached the end.
