From its top-down trappings to Princess Zelda starring as the primary playable protagonist, there’s plenty about the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom that catches the eye, but the central mechanic that the experience is going to be built around will, of course, see players summoning copies – or “echoes” – of a vast amount of objects, enemies, and items, using them in creative ways to solve problems in unique ways.
Exactly how vast will the pool of options be on that front, however? Speaking in a recent Ask the Developer interview published by Nintendo in the lead-up to The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’s release, the action-adventure title’s developers revealed that there are over 100 echoes in the game for players to find and acquire.
Satoshi Terada – who’s serving as the game’s director on developer Grezzo’s side of things – went on to explain that given the vast amount of echoes that will be available to players, it was also important for the development team to ensure that each echo’s function and purpose was clear to players.
“Since there are so many echoes at your disposal, we made sure to give each one a specific characteristic so that players would remember what each one does,” Tareda said. “We wanted players to be able to remember off the top of their heads which echo to use in certain situations.”
Tomomi Sano – the game’s director on Nintendo’s side of things, also also the first female director for a Zelda game to date – elaborated on the same, talking about how the game intends to provide freedom without feeling overwhelming.
“Having the freedom to solve puzzles by yourself is a key feature of Legend of Zelda games. But having too much freedom can leave you feeling stumped,” Sano said. “We made a conscious effort to clearly define the functions of each echo so that players understand how and where they should be used. We were mindful of designing it so that players could reach the gameplay elements we wanted them to experience without getting lost and confused.”
Interestingly enough, though initially in the game’s development, the plan was to have a restriction of 20 total usable echoes at a time in place, the decision was ultimately made to afford much greater freedom to players.
“At the beginning of the game’s development, we were thinking a lot about restrictions on gameplay, assuming that certain things would definitely break the game mechanics or stop the game from working properly,” Tareda explained. “We had ideas like being limited to using only 20 echoes in a dungeon. Lots of ideas like these made it so you couldn’t do things you had previously done. But it would have been frustrating for players if they couldn’t use a solution that worked in a previous situation.
So one day, we decided to scrap that approach and not impose any restrictions.”
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is due out later this week, on September 26, for the Nintendo Switch.