Nintendo has released a series of four interviews in the "Iwata Asks" spirit about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. You can find them all on Nintendo.com. They are featuring series producer Eiji Aonuma, as well as the game's two directors, Satoshi Terada from Grezzo and Tomoni Sano from Nintendo, where the latter gets highlighted as the first female director for the series – certainly fitting for the first mainline title with Zelda as the playable protagonist. Anyway, these interviews are quite insightful, so I wanted to go over some of points here...
A New Game
First of all, it seems like Grezzo immediately started to work on a new Zelda game after the remake of Link's Awakening. You can even see prototype footage that uses the game world of Koholint to experiment with the new echo feature, so it's not like they had started working on another remake and went from there.
Of course they wouldn't talk about potential remakes of Oracle of Ages & Seasons during this, because the fans (including myself) would lose their minds about it. So, they may have even considered those in the early stages, but Aonuma clearly states that he wanted Grezzo to work on a new game after the Link's Awakening remake, because he wants to keep the traditional top-down Zelda games going, in addition to the major 3D games.
This is great, of course, and it's a well-deserved position for Grezzo to be in. But it makes you wonder how they will continue. Will they primarily work on new games from new on? Or will they alternate between new games and remakes? Remaking the Oracle games after Echoes of Wisdom certainly would feel like a downgrade for the developers, understandably so, but at the same time they are the most qualified for the job...
Scrapped Dungeon Maker
In the early development stages, it seems that Grezzo was coming from the Chamber Dungeon idea in Link's Awakening and wanted to turn this into something more filigreed, where you have more freedom. You were making your own dungeons by copy-pasting objects, such as candles and doors.
The idea evolved into something where you can learn new objects in the overworld and then use them to "fill" the dungeon that you were making. But then Aonuma got his very own Miyamoto moment, where he "upended the tea table", because he felt that copying things should be the core focus of the gameplay, as something that you can do everywhere, not just in dungeons. That's how the echoes came to be, but the "edit dungeon" idea was discarded in the process, after one year of development.
It's still very good to know that a dungeon maker concept is something that Grezzo was looking into, because many fans were certainly interested in this after the Chamber Dungeon. However, the announcement and release of Super Dungeon Maker might also have had caused Nintendo to go into a different direction with this, but that's not something that they would publicly admit... Maybe they will even go back to this idea in the future, given that they have enough to make it unique and interesting.
A Link to the Zelda
The interview also outright confirms a suspicion I had when they first announced Echoes of Wisdom: the echoes are the sole reason why you are playing as Zelda. The early prototypes still featured Link as the playable character. In the footage you can see him copying a Thwomp with a magic rod and placing it above the Mysterious Woods on Koholint. (This makes me wonder if Echoes of Wisdom will still have any of the Super Mario enemies present.)
But then they have realized that there is no point in fighting with echoes as long as you have sword and shield. Fighting with your sword is simply more practical. So, they decided that it's finally time for Zelda to shine, because for her it makes sense that she would primarily rely on the echo ability.
Interestingly, this led to developing the rest of the story with the rifts in Hyrule. They needed a reason why Princess Zelda would go on an adventure of her own to save the kingdom, instead of Link or anyone else in her stead, so they came up with the idea of the rifts, which are swallowing the hero, the king, and huge parts of the kingdom.
Eight Times Koholint
They brag a bit about how the size of this new Hyrule is eight times as large as the map of the Link's Awakening remake. If it's also as packed, then this will be a reason to be quite excited, because what makes the remake so incredibly good is how there is something to find around every corner, whether that's a Secret Seashell or a Piece of Heart.
And keep in mind that Koholint isn't actually all too big, because it takes about one minute to get from Dr. Write's house to the Raft-Shop without teleporting, and these places are on a horizontal line on opposing ends of the map. (I'm serious, I've just timed this.)
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