Ask the Developer Vol. 13, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom — Part 1

This article has been translated from the original Japanese content.
Some of the images and videos shown in text were created during development.

In this thirteenth volume of Ask the Developer, an interview series in which Nintendo developers convey in their own words Nintendo's thoughts about creating products and the specific points they are particular about, we're talking to the developers behind The Legend of Zelda™: Echoes of Wisdom game for the Nintendo Switch™ system, which launches on Thursday, September 26.

Check out the rest of the interview

Part 1: Twice as satisfying

First, could you briefly introduce yourselves?

Eiji Aonuma (referred to as Aonuma from this point on): Hello, I'm Eiji Aonuma, the producer of the Legend of Zelda series. For this game, we asked Grezzo (1), the experienced game-development studio that has worked for many years on remakes of games in the Legend of Zelda series, to create an entirely new Legend of Zelda game. We collaborated to complete this project. As the producer, I've played the game from the player's perspective and continuously provided feedback.

(1) Grezzo Co., Ltd. is a game-development studio founded in 2006. In addition to developing remakes within the Legend of Zelda series, such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D for the Nintendo 3DS™ system and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening for Nintendo Switch, they have also been involved in the development of remakes of other titles, such as Luigi's Mansion™ for Nintendo 3DS and Miitopia™ for Nintendo Switch.

Tomomi Sano (referred to as Sano from this point on): Hi, I'm Tomomi Sano. I was the director for this title from Nintendo's side. My role was to manage and coordinate the production for this project, suggest adjustments, and then check the outcome to ensure the gameplay created by Grezzo is aligned with the Legend of Zelda series.

Satoshi Terada (referred to as Terada from this point on): Hello, I'm Satoshi Terada from Grezzo. I originally started out as a designer, mainly doing terrain design and level design (2), but this is the first time I directed a project. I first got involved with the Legend of Zelda series on the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (3). In the previous project, the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (4), I was in charge of the development of the art style, 3D backgrounds, and lighting. This was the first time Grezzo worked on a brand-new game in the Legend of Zelda series.

(2) Determining the placement of objects in the game environment and designing the levels.

(3) The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D is a Nintendo 3DS game released in June 2011. This is a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a Nintendo 64™ game released in November 1998, with updated graphics and new elements.

(4) The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, a Nintendo Switch game released in September 2019. This is a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, a Game Boy™ game released in June 1993 in Japan (August 1993 in the US). It featured diorama-style graphics and new elements such as "Chamber Dungeons."

Thank you. By the way, Sano-san is the first female director of the Legend of Zelda series. What other titles have you worked on in the past?

Sano: Prior to this project, my main role was to support the director. As for the remakes that Grezzo worked on, I was involved in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D (5) and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I was also involved in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD (6), as well as some of the titles in the Mario & Luigi series (7) released prior to Mario & Luigi™: Brothership, which will be released in November this year.

(5) The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D, released for Nintendo 3DS in February 2015. This is a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, a game released for Nintendo 64 in April 2000 (October 2000 in the US), with updated graphics and controls.

(6) The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD, released for Wii U in March 2016. This is a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a game released for Nintendo GameCube and Wii in December 2006 (November 2006 in the US), with a graphics update. Players could experience intuitive controls with the Wii U GamePad controller.

(7) A series of action RPGs starring Mario and Luigi, in which the brothers work together to overcome mysteries and battles as they go on adventures.

Aonuma: I almost always ask her to be engaged in the Legend of Zelda remakes that Grezzo works on.

I see, so Sano-san is an essential part of the Legend of Zelda games developed with Grezzo. So, Aonuma-san, could you please tell us what kind of game this is?

Aonuma: Of course. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a brand-new top-down Legend of Zelda game that revolves around Princess Zelda as the main protagonist. Mysterious rifts appear in the kingdom of Hyrule. People, objects, and even the King of Hyrule and Link are swallowed up by the rifts. The story centers on Princess Zelda who sets out on an adventure with the ethereal creature Tri, creating imitations of various objects to save the people of Hyrule. Zelda can wave a wand, known as the Tri Rod, to create copies of objects such as tables that she can use as platforms to go up to higher places, or copies of monsters to fight for her. We named these imitated creations "echoes" and packed in all sorts of new ways to play using them.

Thank you. You used the phrase "a brand-new top-down Legend of Zelda game." What led to the development of a new game this time?

Aonuma: Actually, I've always wanted to establish a 2D top-down Legend of Zelda series that's separate from the 3D entries like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game style and how it feels are completely different when the world is viewed in 3D from behind the character to when the world is viewed from a top-down perspective. We wanted to cherish that kind of diversity in the Legend of Zelda series. Amid all this, we felt that the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on Nintendo Switch, which we developed with Grezzo, had become our new approach in terms of graphics and gameplay feel, as a top-down Legend of Zelda game for the Nintendo Switch generation. Grezzo had established an excellent way of reviving the top-down Legend of Zelda experience for a modern era, so I thought we could develop something completely new that had never been done before.

Most of the Legend of Zelda games that Grezzo had worked on until this game were remakes. Since you were creating a new game this time, did that significantly change how Nintendo and Grezzo worked together?

Aonuma: Yes, there naturally was quite a lot that changed. To mention a major change, at the start of development, we asked Grezzo employees to pitch internally their ideas for this new Legend of Zelda game. More specifically, we asked Grezzo, "If you were to make the next new game, what kind of game would you like it to be?" We had the opportunity to hear ideas from members of Grezzo, which they came up with freely and proposed.

Terada: It was a big event for Grezzo. 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. (Laughs) Thanks to this, we came up with so many ideas that it took us three days just to go over and review them. Since it was a Legend of Zelda project, everyone worked hard on proposals and presented them in front of Aonuma-san with pounding hearts. (Laughs)

Aonuma: I've worked with Grezzo for a long time, though... (Laughs) But when we were working on remakes, we didn't really get the chance to hear everyone's ideas. This time, we asked everyone, not only the project planners for the game, but also the designers and programmers, to come up with lots of ideas.

Sano: Dozens of people participated, and even though they didn't brainstorm together or anything like that, surprisingly a number of similar ideas were proposed. But that's not a bad thing at all. I think everyone had a common idea of something they wanted to do in a game, and it just perfectly suited the world of the Legend of Zelda.

Terada: So, we went through the ideas that came out of the pitch and picked out a variety that looked good. From there, we decided to move forward with a focus on copy-and-paste gameplay (8) and gameplay that combines top-down view and side view.

(8) Gameplay where a player can copy something from the field and paste it somewhere else. For example, if you copied a table and pasted it several times, you could use those tables to make a staircase, and if you copied an enemy and pasted it in front of another enemy, it would fight for you.

Aonuma: These were the two basic elements, and from there, I asked them to think of ways to add some freedom. Having worked on games in the Legend of Zelda series over the years, we started to feel that fans may not continue playing this franchise unless they can think independently and try various things freely on their own, rather than following a set path. Even when it comes to solving puzzles – in a game in the Legend of Zelda series, having the excitement of solving puzzles in your own unique way makes the game "Legend of Zelda-like." Hence, we need to increase the degree of freedom to achieve that. With this in mind, I asked Grezzo to use those two elements as a foundation for the gameplay and add freedom on top of it.

So, after the large-scale pitch for ideas, two foundations were set. What kind of gameplay did that translate to?

Terada: We were exploring a few different ways to play the game in parallel. In one approach, Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and candlesticks, to create original dungeons. During this exploration phase, this idea was called an "edit dungeon" because players could create their own Legend of Zelda gameplay.

Aonuma: They showed it to me and told me to give it a try. As I played, I started thinking that while it's fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it, it's also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies. That was the beginning of gameplay using "echoes." The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure.

I see, so that's how the idea of using "echoes" was developed. Did you make this change in gameplay early on in development?

Aonuma: Umm...

Sano: It'd been about a year since we'd started prototyping with the "edit dungeon" idea.

Terada: ...It'd been that long.

Sano: Upending the tea table after a year. (Laughs)

Aonuma: Everyone else was developing the game with dungeon creation in mind, but I was right next to them thinking of something different. (Laughs) But there's a reason it took a year to upend the tea table.

After all, you can't really see the potential for ideas to develop into solid gameplay until you can verify features and their feel, so I wanted them to try making it first. I felt that the "edit dungeon" feature they showed me had significant potential to be developed into a new way of playing the Legend of Zelda games if the gameplay was changed to use "echoes" instead. So, I thought it would be good to expand in that direction and could be even more interesting that way. However, there was one concern. Even though game consoles have larger memory capacity nowadays, the more things players can copy and paste, the more game memory is used up. I was really worried that it would crash the game.

But wasn't it you, Aonuma-san, despite that concern, who ultimately made the decision to upend the tea table?

Aonuma: It certainly was. (Laughs) But I thought we could make something more interesting if we pushed harder. I wasn't sure how far we could go, but in the end, it was amazing to see how many echoes it was possible to create in the game. It must have been difficult to manage the game memory.

Sano: I did notice from the very beginning that copying new things is a lot of fun in itself. The "edit dungeon" concept involved copying various things during your adventure out on the game field, then bringing them back to create a dungeon in a dedicated place. When I was on this adventure of collecting things to copy, I noticed that if I pasted something that was only present in the side-view perspective into a location with a top-down perspective, it worked just fine. In 2D games, even if an object looks the same, it's often made and used completely differently between top-down view and side view. But Grezzo created a single object that would function in both views.

The same object could be used in multiple points of view?

Sano: Yes, it's the same object, but it seems to work differently when you look at it from another angle, which is interesting to us. For example, in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, there is an enemy called a Thwomp that falls from above and crushes things below and only appears in the side-view perspective. If you copy that and paste it into the top view, you can drop it from above and crush things below, or conversely, you can ride on the Thwomp and use it to climb upward.

I was surprised to see that even though the functions are the same, you can use it in new ways just by changing the viewing angle.

Aonuma: That felt outrageously fun.

Sano: 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.

Were the developers at Grezzo conscious of combining top-down views and side views even when prototyping the "edit dungeon" gameplay?

Terada: After we finished developing the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, we really liked its world, so we talked with Nintendo about creating the "edit dungeon" concept, which we were prototyping back then, in a similar vein. Since the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening had areas with both top-down and side views, naturally everyone at Grezzo assumed from the start that we would create both top-down and side views in this title. However, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is set on an island with a smaller map size and was a remake, so it was limited in terms of what could be added during development. So, for this new game, we created the prototype with the idea of expanding on what we all wanted to do.

Aonuma: When you encounter a Thwomp in a side-scrolling game, it looks like a thin rectangle, as you can see only the front of it, but when you look at it from a different angle, it looks like a giant rock that makes a loud crash sound when it falls. Its presence as an object is completely altered.

Sano: Even if you use the exact same function, changing your perspective can help you better understand how to use it. A question like, "How high does this object go up and down?" is easier to check with the side view, and "How big is this object?" has a clearer answer with the top-down view. As we progressed through development, we felt that the changes in perspective made it twice as satisfying.