Nintendo has explained why Princess Zelda is the protagonist of the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and it turns out that she wasn't always intended to be the star of the game.
In the latest Echoes of Wisdom Ask the Developer interview, which follows on from yesterday's, producer Eiji Aonuma sits down alongside directors Tomomi Sano and Satoshi Terada to answer more questions about the upcoming top-down action-adventure game.
Aonuma says that initially, the team planned Link to be Echoes of Wisdom's protagonist, but given the "copy-and-paste" gameplay style, the developers quickly found that Link's sword and shield "got in the way".
According to Aonuma, the team realized that "if you have a sword and shield, you can just fight using those", and that there would be no need for the echo system if Link simply had weapons.
Terada then chips in to say that the team originally considered having Link only be able to use echoes to begin with and unlocking the sword and shield later, but then they realized that "once [players] got the sword and shield, they would stop using echoes".
This led to a realization that the protagonist of Echoes of Wisdom would need to be a character that didn't fight with a sword and shield, which is where Zelda comes in.
Aonuma says that he and the Zelda team have been asked many times over the years whether Zelda would be the protagonist of her own story, and when he saw the team "struggling to identify" Echoes of Wisdom's ideal protagonist, he realized it would be "exactly the game" for Zelda.
Later in the interview, Aonuma says that he and the team "had no intention of establishing any new theories" in Zelda lore with Echoes of Wisdom, so don't expect any earth-shattering timeline revelations.
It's well worth reading the full conversation with Aonuma, Sano, and Terada, especially if you're a Zelda fan, as it's got some very enlightening tidbits of information regarding Echoes of Wisdom's development and the series as a whole.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom launches exclusively for Nintendo Switch on September 26th. Check out our preview of the game here to find out whether we think its more creative and freeform approach will pay off.
