The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Started Out as a Dungeon-Making Game
Meet your maker.
Echoes of Wisdom puts a big twist on The Legend of Zelda’s formula, letting players summon dozens of items out of thin air to help solve puzzles and navigate the world. But that fascinating idea started out as something much different, it started out as a game where players built their own dungeons to share with others. That’s an idea that fans have wanted for years, ever since Nintendo released Super Mario Maker in 2015. But considering the form Echoes of Wisdom has now taken, it feels unlikely we’ll ever see that Zelda Maker.
Ahead of Echoes of Wisdom’s release, Nintendo has published an “Ask the Developer” interview, featuring the game’s directors from Grezzo, Tomomi Sano and Satoshi Terada, as well as The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma. While Echoes of Wisdom is the first new Zelda game developed by Grezzo, the studio has been creating the series’ remaster for over a decade, including Link’s Awakening, Majora’s Mask, and Ocarina of Time 3D.
In Echoes of Wisdom you use “echoes” to summon objects like beds or pots to solve puzzles, and can summon certain enemies to fight for you as well.
During the interview, Terada mentioned the team was exploring multiple different ideas for Echoes of Wisdom, one of which was an approach where “Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and candlesticks, to create original dungeons.” This was called the “edit dungeon” phase, and once completed these dungeons could be shared with other players. That sure sounds a heck of a lot like Mario Maker’s formula, although relegated specifically to dungeons.
What’s especially interesting is that the idea progressed for an entire year before it was scrapped and turned into Echoes of Wisdom.
“They showed it to me and told me to give it a try. 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,” Aonuma says, “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.”
Aonuma notes that development continued for that long before changing because he wanted to see the idea realized fully, saying, “Everyone else was developing the game with dungeon creation in mind, but I was right next to them thinking of something different.”
Echoes of Wisdom is Zelda’s first solo adventure, but she’ll have some companions along the way.
It’s not unusual to see games go through massive changes during development, but this paired with previous comments from Aonuma makes seeing a Zelda-Maker feel more and more unlikely. In a December 2023 interview with Polygon, Aonuma touched on players who want more creation abilities in Zelda games.
“There are people who want the ability to create from scratch, but that’s not everyone. But I think everyone delights in the discovery of finding your own way through a game, and that is something we tried to make sure was included in Tears of the Kingdom; there isn’t one right way to play,” Aonuma says, “If you are a creative person, you have the ability to go down that path. But that’s not what you have to do; you’re also able to proceed to the game in many other different ways. And so I don’t think that it would be a good fit for The Legend of Zelda to necessarily require people to build things from scratch and force them to be creative."
We now know that Aonuma likely made those comments with not just Tears of the Kingdom in mind, but also Echoes of Wisdom. The crux of the issue seems to be that Aonuma feels like Nintendo can consistently do something far more interesting with a unique idea, rather than just giving players a slate of options to use. Never say never, of course, but you likely shouldn’t hold your breath for a Zelda maker anytime in the near future. The entire interview with Echoes of Wisdom’s creators is worth reading, however, as it’s a fascinating look into Nintendo’s development that we don’t often see.
