How Zelda became a first-time protagonist in her own series

Zelda wasn’t always the protagonist of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. At first, Nintendo thought it’d be Link. The original idea for the game sounded a lot like Mario Maker, with Link copying and pasting items into Hyrule — but his sword and shield kept getting in the way, according to Echoes of Wisdom developers Eiji Aonuma, Tomomi Sano, and Satoshi Terada. As part of Nintendo’s “Ask the Developer” series, Aonuma, Sano, and Terada participated in an interview to talk about Echoes of Wisdom before its Sept. 26 release date. Three parts have been released so far, and this latest one is all about Zelda as the star of the game.

The first idea was to use Link, without his sword and shield, to encourage players to use echoes — the main gameplay mechanic in Echoes of Wisdom. Then, Link would get his sword and shield back later. “But even then, we thought that once they got the sword and shield, they would stop using echoes,” said Terada, a director at Grezzo, Nintendo’s partner developer on Echoes of Wisdom. “That’s just your typical Legend of Zelda game. What are we going to do?” added Aonuma, the longtime Zelda producer and senior officer of Nintendo EPD, the in-house developer.

They eventually landed on making Zelda the protagonist, as she doesn’t use a sword or shield. But it would be Zelda’s first real foray as the franchise protagonist, so it had to make sense. The team thought about everything down to Zelda’s outfit, but nothing clicked except her iconic dress — with the addition of Link’s hood. It all came down to finding a story reason for Zelda to have to take on whatever evil is threatening Hyrule; because she’s royalty, it’s not like she’d come out to take on the everyday monsters that Link usually handles, Aonuma said.

“So we eventually decided that the setting of this game would involve lots of large, mysterious rifts appearing in Hyrule,” Aonuma said. “We had to come up with something that wasn’t a monster but something that would make a princess think, ‘This is bad! I have to do something!’ A princess is a daughter of the rulers of a country. So I thought that the motivation to fight is that the world of Hyrule is being destroyed and changed.”

This goes back to Zelda’s outfit; Nintendo and Grezzo thought it might be weird for Zelda to have a brand-new adventurer’s outfit ready to go, as if she knew she’d be setting off. She didn’t, so pink dress it was, topped off with Link’s hood as a visual reminder of her mission to save Link and Hyrule.

Echoes of Wisdom sounds like it was a challenge to develop around, which led to a lot of questions. “Though creating the initial world setting was difficult, we also thought about what role Link would play in the game,” Terada said. “What would happen to the sword if the gameplay focused on echoes? Can this character even exist in this game? The Legend of Zelda series has a grand historical lineage. How should I put it? How far should we delve into the lore of The Legend of Zelda?”

Nintendo held “boot camps” that added up to nine days to the total development time, according to game director Sano, during which they worked from morning to night on a story.

“Even with this title, we had no intention of establishing any new theories in the series’ lore,” Aonuma said. “Link goes on an adventure every time and experiences many things. But Princess Zelda has always had to take a step back in the Legend of Zelda series. But this time, Princess Zelda is on her own adventure, so the story takes on a different perspective than before. I think that’s why we were able to create something new in terms of the story as well.”