Echoes of Evolution: How The Legend of Zelda Keeps Changing – Feature

Nintendo surprisingly announced a brand new 2D Zelda game with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, due out in September 2024. While a lot of folks definitely hoped for a Zelda game where you play as Zelda, I don’t think it was on many Bingo cards before the June 2024 Nintendo Direct. But here we are: living in a world where Nintendo revealed the latest entry in their legendary Zelda series just three months before its launch. And it looks great! The map looks like it’s a modified version of Link to the Past, but Link never had the power to create beds and moblins out of thin air before. And his inventory didn’t look like it was straight out of Breath of the Wild. And Link never had this kind of puzzle-solving freedom except for, well, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Echoes of Wisdom is the latest in the modern evolution of the Zelda series that kicked off more than a decade ago. We don’t know exactly how the game will shake out, but early results seem to suggest that while this is a 2D Zelda game, it might share more in common with the design ethos behind Breath of the Wild. How did we get here? It started back in the waning days of the Wii.

Before we start, let’s get things clear: I’ve been delighted and mystified by the Legend of Zelda games from the moment I first came across the original gold NES cartridge sometime in the early 1990s. I didn’t totally leap into super fan status until the late ‘90s when I was swept off my feet by Ocarina of Time and then proceeded to tackle everything I hadn’t finished that came out beforehand. I appreciate the design of the first NES Zelda. I think Link to the Past rocks. I’m still waiting for the Zelda II remake because that game is very neat but also peppered with a lot of ‘80s jank. I just want to make it clear that I love the old dungeon-heavy gameplay flow that Link to the Past cemented as the franchise gold standard for two decades. Because in addition to loving that familiar pattern, I also love how Eiji Aonuma and the Zelda team at Nintendo realized they were hitting diminishing returns and decided to redefine what Zelda as a series was following the somewhat tepid response to the 2011 Wii release The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. It was around that time that Aonuma and Nintendo started to rethink the conventions of Zelda. And in January 2013, Aonuma revealed his intentions to the world of Nintendo fans.

In 2013, Nintendo was in a bad place as a company, about to kick off the worst stretch in their decades of video games. The Wii U had launched with a thud in November 2012, capping off a speed-run of tanking the goodwill generated from the smashing success of the Wii and Nintendo DS. It’s worth noting the 3DS was doing okay at this point, salvaging a borderline catastrophic launch and eking out a nice niche for itself in video games, though nowhere near the same level as its dual-screened predecessor.

But the Wii U was the device that needed saving and on January 23, 2013, Nintendo presented a Wii U Direct focused primarily on Nintendo’s own games hosted by the then-president Satoru Iwata. It was a hail mary, announcing a number of Nintendo’s major projects that would take the rest of the Wii U’s short life to come out. A new 3D Mario game and a new Mario Kart were both announced with no other details, images, or news. Iwata also mentioned the existence of a new party game from the Wii Party team, a new Yoshi platformer, a Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem crossover, and a new Monolith Soft game. Those last three games would eventually come out between 2015 and 2016 as Yoshi’s Woolly World, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, and Xenoblade Chronicles X.

The biggest reveal, however, was a new Legend of Zelda game that would eventually become The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Eiji Aonuma stood in front of the blank white background and took to outlining the driving theme of development for the next Zelda game roughly a year after the last one shipped. He stated his mission very plainly: “Rethink the conventions of Zelda.” He highlighted those conventions as being things like completing dungeons in a certain order and playing solo. He then quickly diverted the audience’s attention from the fact that they had nothing else to say about their next major Zelda game (we would see a brief clip in June 2014 at E3) and announced Wind Waker HD for release later that year. Part of the reason for Wind Waker HD’s existence was stated plainly by Aonuma. It was going to take a while for Breath of the Wild, so here’s Wind Waker HD in the meantime. In retrospect, that also explains why Twilight Princess HD and Skyward Sword HD were both made. I guess if we want more old Zelda remakes, we need to cheer for new games to take a long time to make.

Looking at what Aonuma said more than 11 years ago, it’s wild how much he’s been a man of his word. Basically every new Zelda game – mainline or spinoff – has been an experiment in breaking conventions, to the point that what we once knew as Zelda isn’t really the same as it was 10 years ago. I’ve long been fascinated by how the Zelda games have evolved over the years and since the late 1990s, Eiji Aonuma has been heavily involved in the series, eventually becoming the series producer. While the first 15 years of 3D Zelda was executing on a consistent structure and style, each one built on the previous one in unique and interesting ways. Look at the battle system that started quite basic in Ocarina of Time and then featured the addition of parrying in Wind Waker, specific moves in Twilight Princess, and then the featured motion control combat in Skyward Sword. You can even look at something like the Command Melody in Wind Waker being streamlined into the Dominion Rod in Twilight Princess.

Looking at 2D Zelda, I’d argue that the series conventions have almost always been rethought. You have the leap from Zelda 1 to 2. The experiments of Link’s Awakening on Game Boy, the Oracle games duology, the multiplayer in Four Swords and Four Swords Adventures, and the touch screen controls in Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. 2D Zelda has never stayed still, though recently it’s been dormant. And that’s what makes The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’s upcoming Switch release so exciting and interesting.

But to get to Echoes of Wisdom, Aonuma and the Zelda team had more than a decade of deliberate, announced convention breaking to do. Let’s look at how we got from the relative low point the Zelda series stood at after Skyward Sword was released in 2011 to the world of 2024 where the Zelda franchise is assuredly one of Nintendo’s most exciting and successful, complete with a movie in the works.

When Aonuma spoke about his intentions to shake up Zelda in January 2013, he hid the fact their first statement on the matter was coming out later that year. It wasn’t Wind Waker HD. Instead it was The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Announced in April 2013, The game was billed as a Link to the Past sequel in Japan and shares roughly the same map and similar overarching structure as the influential Super Nintendo classic. Within that familiar structure, the back half of the game toyed with dungeon completion order.

Through the character Ravio, players can rent or buy weapons and items to let them access and complete dungeons in whatever order they want, primarily in the back half of the game. It was an interesting idea, but it does lead to the latter parts of A Link Between Worlds having a flat difficulty curve because, in theory, you need to account for that dungeon being someone’s first and last experience in that section of the game. But the spirit of Aonuma’s quest kicked off in earnest. The conventions of Zelda – which had been relatively the same since 1991 – were being rethought. However, we saw that happen every now and then in the past. Would A Link Between Worlds be the norm or would it be a one-off in the same vein as Majora’s Mask? The answer is easy, because why else would I be talking about the evolution of Zelda here if they didn’t keep reinventing it.

The multiplayer part would be the next concept that Aonuma and team would tackle across Hyrule Warriors and Tri Force Heroes. While Hyrule Warriors is a spin-off, it did allow players to play as more characters than Link, including Zelda, Impa, and even Ganondorf. Tri Force Heroes was very much in the same vein as Four Swords, but it added online multiplayer. And I guess you could think that making fashion a key part of a Zelda game was a rethinking of a convention as well. Hell, that fashion aspect is honestly a big part of Breath of the Wild too. While Tri Force Heroes wouldn’t go down as an all-time great, it still showed the spirit of continuous innovation to figure out what Zelda should be in the 21st century.

The true marker for if Aonuma’s plan of convention breaking would work was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This is the bold new frontier he staked everything on beginning with that mention in January 2013. More than four years after he laid out his plans, Breath of the Wild launched on Wii U and more importantly, the brand new Nintendo Switch console. To say the rethink of what a Zelda game is in Breath of the Wild worked would be an understatement. It was an unqualified smashing success that cemented Zelda as a marquee franchise once again. After years in the wilderness, Zelda was in the same sales realm as Nintendo’s biggest movers. It even had the critical acclaim to back it up, notching numerous Game of the Year awards and going down as one of the best games of the decade.

Tears of the Kingdom would further the ideas of Breath of the Wild, emphasizing player freedom, exploration, and creativity. It’s wild that we went from Link exploring a barren Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time to Link building a Death Star stapled together with green glue while he flies in the air on a fan-powered bicycle. It’s telling that after Tears of the Kingdom’s launch, Aonuma seems content to leave that style behind. We do not know what the future of 3D Zelda looks like, but the team seems like it’ll keep nimble in the future, making sure they don’t stay stagnant for too long.

In the time between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, one of the bigger franchise releases was a remake of the Game Boy classic Link’s Awakening. The cute toy-like art style drove what was by most accounts a pretty standard remake. But after seeing Echoes of Wisdom carry forth the same art style, what that remake added stands out way more. The new mode Chamber Dungeon features the gravekeeper Dampe guiding Link through a cute little dungeon maker where you move around tiles to solve puzzles and make your own dungeons. It felt like an experiment from the Zelda team to try to see if a Mario Maker but for Zelda could work and while I would never rule anything out at this point, a Zelda Maker might not be in the cards. The idea of iterating off of that idea to get to a character creating items and enemies in the world to solve puzzles does seem within that same ballpark.

Nintendo historically makes gameplay mechanics before locking in the framework, and it seems likely that the Zelda team experimented with items and enemies being cloned in the world for combat and puzzles. The change in gameplay sounds like it fits Zelda herself more than Link, especially since focusing combat on generating echoes would involve Link not having a sword, which seems like a convention Aonuma might not want to break just yet. Ergo, we now have a Zelda game starring Zelda.

We have so far only seen a few scattered minutes of Echoes of Wisdom, but it’s an impressive opening salvo for a game we get to play very soon. Maybe it’s not fully elements of Breath of the Wild mapped to 2D. Maybe it does follow the traditional dungeon structure. Maybe it’s littered with Shrines on the Link to the Past map. Maybe you go to Lorule or the Dark World. Who knows! Aonuma has succeeded on his goal of changing up the series conventions because at this point, it’s way harder to guess what they’ll do next. The future of Hyrule is vast.

If I had to guess though, I think Aonuma knocks on the multiplayer door again. They’ve messed around in spinoffs, but the multiplayer aspect has been more on the fringes than on the main stage. I’m not going to say a multiplayer 3D Zelda is in the works, but there does seem to be room for Aonuma and the team to experiment. I will close this by sharing my dream for a battle royale on the Breath of the Wild map. Make the weapons breakable and add in all sorts of random Nintendo skins. Let’s go.