With The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom releasing later this week, the upcoming title, which casts Zelda as its protagonist, instead of Link, is the latest game to to be covered as part of Nintendo’s “Ask the Developer” interview series. Across multiple chapters, many questions were asked of Series Producer, Eiji Aonuma, and Directors, Tomomi Sano, and Satoshi Terada.
When talking about their involvement with Echoes of Wisdom, Sano, Aonuma, and Terada explain Princess Zelda’s motivations and the dangers of this new Hyrule:
Echoes of Wisdom Devs on Zelda’s Motivation and Hyrule’s Dangers:
Tomomi Sano: It’s an ability that lets you bind with an object to have it copy your movements, making them move. Conversely, you can also bind yourself to an object to mirror its movements in the same way.
Eiji Aonuma: Well, first it was difficult to find a motive to send Princess Zelda on an adventure. In Link’s case, he is destined to be a hero, so if there are monsters, he sets out on a journey to defeat them, and that makes sense. But in the case of Princess Zelda, as she is royalty, we needed to carefully craft the setting of why she really needs to leave her castle when there are people around her who can fight.
Satoshi Terada: But the more we thought about it, the harder it was to come up with a convincing enough reason for Princess Zelda to leave for an adventure. (Laughs)
Eiji Aonuma: Just having monsters roaming around Hyrule wouldn’t be enough to motivate Princess Zelda to directly fight them. We tried brainstorming all sorts of ideas for what kind of situation would necessitate that the princess take matters into her own hands.
Satoshi Terada: One staff member, as if Princess Zelda were his own child, said, “We can’t send the princess on an adventure yet. I’d go instead under these circumstances!”. (Laughs)
Eiji Aonuma: So we eventually decided that the setting of this game would involve lots of large, mysterious rifts appearing in Hyrule. 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.
Tomomi Sano: Even after we decided to make rifts a part of the game’s setting, the design was still a challenge. The story is that inside the rifts lies the Still World, where people and things go when they’re swallowed up. No one has ever seen a place like that.
It’s easy to say, “The ground cracked, and below that is a world of void”. But the designers from Grezzo who had to develop those ideas into visuals were scratching their heads with questions like, “How does the rift expand?”, “How deep does it go?” and, “How do we show the transition between the game field and the world of void?”. (Laughs)
Satoshi Terada: And, since they appear in various places around Hyrule, they need to be able to be placed anywhere, including on the ground, on top of buildings, on water, or in lava, etc. We had to keep in mind that the placements of rifts could change based on level design or that the rifts could appear or disappear at any time at different points in the story. It was extremely difficult to create something visually new under such restrictions.
Eiji Aonuma: I didn’t want to depict anything too cruel in a world where the main protagonist isn’t a fighter per se, but I still needed to deliver a sense of danger approaching Hyrule. It was quite challenging to create that.
Tomomi Sano: We also had a hard time developing the scene in which the king is swallowed by a rift, which is one of Princess Zelda’s biggest motivations for setting out on her journey.
Satoshi Terada: Though creating the initial world setting was difficult, we also thought about what role Link would play in the game. 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?
For the full interview, why not click here to check out Ask the Developer Vol. 13, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom – Chapter 3:
Ask the Developer | The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Participating Developers)
- Eiji Aonuma | Senior Officer, Entertainment Planning & Development Division (and Series Producer)
- Tomomi Sano | Entertainment Planning & Development Division, Production Group No.3 (and Director)
- Satoshi Terada | Director, Grezzo
