The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was supposed to be a link to the past… by which we mean A Link to the Past. The recent action-adventure title from Nintendo and Grezzo has been making waves across the gaming industry as it features a Zelda-led story that stands among the greats within the beloved franchise. While the game’s story might not allude to the initial development of the title, it was revealed in an interview that Echoes of Wisdom was created during the production of what was supposed to be a sequel to the 1992 SNES action-adventure title The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
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During an interview with the Polish website naEkranie, Echoes of Wisdom creators Tomomi Sano, Satoshi Terada and Eiji Aonuma touched upon the development stages of the title, as this venture would mark their sixth collaboration with Grezzo, who brought a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening in 2019. Many fans noted the coincidence between the map and representatives of races (Zoras and Dekus) of Echoes of Wisdom and Link to the Past, which was mentioned during the interview. Echoes of Wisdom’s director Tomomi Sano stated,
“First, we made decisions about gameplay and specific locations. Once we had those, and we had locations related to water and forest, for example, we chose specific races – River Zora and Sea Zora in water locations, and Deku Scrubs in forest. Grezzo also worked on the Majora’s Mask remake, which featured those races. We wanted to introduce them in a way that made sense to our game.”
Nintendo and Grezzo Initially Planned on Making A Link to the Past Sequel
Grezzo’s work has brought some of the classic Zelda titles to the spotlight like The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D for the Nintendo 3DS over a decade ago. At this point, the company had done one original Zelda title with Nintendo, which was The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes in 2015, so the switch to crafting an original story came down to the change in gameplay and character.
Curating an entirely new gameplay style was tricky, but using Echoes provided the team with an interesting approach when it came to representing the unique visuals of Grezzo’s The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. When director Satoshi Terada was asked about the echoes design, explained the team’s focus and their concerns.
“There’s a lot of variety in the game when it comes to Echoes. It was really hard to predict how players would use and play with them. That’s why we focused on goals, like reaching a certain height, pressing a specific enemy, or defeating an enemy. We left the process in the players’ hands. All we cared about was making it possible to do it and not breaking the game. At first, we thought it would be hard to balance, but with this approach it turned out to be easier than we thought.”
The addition of echoes and Zelda proved to be a wise choice seeing how the title has become one of Nintendo’s best games of 2024. While many fans would’ve liked to have seen a remake of A Link to the Past, there’s no question that the possibility of the title making its way to the Nintendo Switch 2 is palpable. Seeing how The Legend of Zelda series doesn’t have any new titles launching soon, we could hope to see something new in the works between Nintendo and Grezzo.
