We had a great time with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom earlier this year, but that’s not to say that it’s without its faults. A fair few of us got frustrated with the variable frame rate and the Echoes menu system could often feel like a scroll too far.
Two months on, a handful of the game’s developers have sat down with the BBC to talk about these criticisms and attempt to explain the thought process behind them. And it’ll come as no surprise that Nintendo has an optimistic spin to put on each.
There’s a certain amount of hoop-jumping going on with the devs’ menu justification, but Echoes of Wisdom’s long, singular line of summon options was, apparently, an intentional decision. According to co-director and Grezzo chief Satoshi Terada, the menu system was all about encouraging players to “fall upon” Echoes that they might have missed and inspire them to use each in different situations:
One of the essences of this game is being able to figure out different ways of using each of these echoes. And so in that sense we wanted players to fall upon and see the echoes that they may not have noticed or have been using while they’re sorting through all the echoes that they have
Hmm, okay. We thought that the long scrolling menu was just a remnant of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom’s design, to which Echoes’ more intensive menu visits felt somewhat ill-equipped. But hey, apparently it was all part of the plan…
As it turns out, the Echoes system as a whole really took some getting used to at Nintendo. This was even true for Aonuma who, in the same interview, confessed that it took him beating the game once (of the eight playthroughs he did during production) to really get used to it:
From the second time through I sort of realised that there’s various ways and methods of overcoming these puzzles and overcoming the challenges. And so I think that realisation that you can do various things and there are various ways to overcome and solve these puzzles is sort of a turning point of whether you become used to using the echoes in the new game system.
The sworded issue of EoW’s frame rate landed a much more succinct response from co-director Tomomi Sano, who simply replied that the developers felt the variable approach was the “best option” available. Fair enough.
The BBC interview also sees the developers confess that they were nervous about revealing Zelda as the hero, talk about watching playthrough videos online and look to the future of the top-down structure. You can read the full chat on the BBC website.
