We had a blast with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom earlier this year, but that doesn’t mean it’s without its flaws. Some of us were frustrated with the variable frame rate, and the Echoes menu system could often feel like you scrolled too far.
Two months later, several game developers sat down with BBC talk about these criticisms and try to explain the thought process behind them. And it will come as no surprise that Nintendo has an optimistic spin on each of them.
There’s a certain amount of jumping around in regards to the developer menu justification, but Echoes of Wisdom’s long, unique line of summoning options was clearly a deliberate decision. According to Grezzo co-director and head Satoshi Terada, the menu system was aimed at encouraging players to “fall on” Echoes they may have missed and inspire them to use each in different situations:
One of the essences of this game is the ability to think of different ways to use each of these echoes. And so in that sense, we wanted players to sense and see echoes that they might not have noticed or used while sorting through all the echoes they have
Hmm, okay. We thought the long scrolling menu was just a holdover from the design of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, for which Echoes’ more intense menu visits felt a bit 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, admitted that it took him beating the game once (out of the eight playthroughs he did during production) to really get used to it:
From the second time, I somehow realized that there are different ways and methods to overcome these puzzles and challenges. And so I think knowing that you can do different things and that there are different ways to overcome and solve these puzzles is kind of a turning point in whether or not you’re going to get used to using echoes in a new game system.
A pointed question about EoW’s framerate led to 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.
The BBC interview also sees the developers admit to being nervous about revealing Zelda as a hero, talking about watching videos online and looking at the future of the top-down structure. You can read the entire chat at BBC site.
