Grezzo’s Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom started out as a dungeon creation game

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom started out as a dungeon creation game, it’s been revealed.

In an Ask the Developer interview published on Nintendo’s website, it’s also been confirmed for the first time that the Switch game was developed by long-time partner studio Grezzo.

Releasing on Friday, the latest game from the studio behind the Switch remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is its first brand-new entry in Nintendo’s series.

It’s also the first Zelda game to have a female director, with Tomomi Sano serving as the director for the title on Nintendo’s side.

The top-down game stars Princess Zelda as the main protagonist, who can wield the power of the Tri Rod to create “echoes” (i.e. copies) of objects and even enemies to help traverse the environment, battle enemies and complete objectives.

Grezzo, which also developed the 3DS remakes of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask and co-developed the 3DS Luigi’s Mansion remake, said it initially explored developing the game as a dungeon creation title, before Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma steered the project in another direction.

“We were exploring a few different ways to play the game in parallel,” said Satoshi Terada, the director of the game on Grezzo’s side. “In one approach, Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and candlesticks, to create original dungeons. During this exploration phase, this idea was called an ‘edit dungeon’ because players could create their own Legend of Zelda gameplay.”

“They showed it to me and told me to give it a try,” Aonuma said. “As I played, I started thinking that while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it, it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies. That was the beginning of gameplay using ‘echoes’. The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure.”

This change in direction was made about a year after the game’s developers had started prototyping with the dungeon editing idea.

“Everyone else was developing the game with dungeon creation in mind, but I was right next to them thinking of something different,” said Aonuma. “But there’s a reason it took a year to upend the tea table.

“After all, you can’t really see the potential for ideas to develop into solid gameplay until you can verify features and their feel, so I wanted them to try making it first. I felt that the ‘edit dungeon’ feature they showed me had significant potential to be developed into a new way of playing the Legend of Zelda games if the gameplay was changed to use ‘echoes’ instead. So, I thought it would be good to expand in that direction and could be even more interesting that way.”

Social media platforms have recently been flooded with streams of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, after some players managed to obtain physical copies of the game ahead of its release.