From the start, The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom would be one of the most unique games in the series’ history. After all, the point of the game was to take the reins away from Link, give them to Princess Zelda, and have her play the game in an entirely different way. Specifically, she would use special replicas of items and creatures called “Echoes” to help her on her journey. She could use them to solve puzzles, traverse terrain, fight monsters, and more. The gambit turned out to be a huge success, and people hope that more adventures like this are in Zelda’s future.
Going back to the echoes, there were over 100 of them within the game that people could get and collect as they explored this newest version of Hyrule. However, did you ever wonder how each of those 100+ echoes got selected by the team? Co-director Satoshi Terada talked with Famitsu about that, and he admitted that the team started out with just covering the basic echoes that Zelda would likely find within a certain region and then building things up from there:
“We first thought about how many echoes each region should have, then after considering using regions from the series’ past, we also thought ‘what experiences would be unique to each region?’ Furthermore, we also tried to prepare ‘things we think would be interesting’. Because there were a lot of echoes, we tried to make each and every one’s unique characteristics stand out to differentiate them.”
That last one in particular is interesting because some of the echoes within the game were “leveled up” versions of past ones, and others were simply different elemental versions of certain echoes, like with the Keese. Either way, the team had to work hard to keep the echoes interesting while ensuring that they worked within the “rules” of Hyrule.
Overall, most agreed that the echoes were a fascinating gameplay mechanic, especially since everyone used the echoes differently to both defeat bosses and get around terrain obstacles. One of the most classic examples of this was using the bed echo. The first bed echo you get in the game only costs you one “charge” throughout the game, and as you get more charges, you can stack the beds like a ladder to get around.
The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom had numerous options for how the echoes could be used, so you might want to try and mix things up if you give the game another runthrough.
