A Developer Interview Revealed Echoes Of Wisdom Was Initially Planned To Be A Link To The Past Sequel

Nintendo released their much-anticipated solo adventure for the Princess of Hyrule, Zelda, in September 2024 in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which received mostly positive reviews following its release. The game's developers have chronicled the development process in the "Ask the Developer" series, which covered multiple topics, including the game mechanics, the Echoes system, and the significance of Zelda as a protagonist, which are available via the Nintendo news site.

A few months following the game's release, a new interview with the development team revealed a revelation on the game's connection to an iconic Zelda SNES game, A Link to the Past. Given some similarities between Echoes of Wisdom and A Link to the Past, and their co-developer Grezzo having worked on a few Zelda remakes, this revelation should come as no surprise as players and fans had taken note of a handful of shared connections between the two games.

Echoes of Wisdom's game director, Tomomi Sano, producer Eiji Aonuma, and Grezzo's Satoshi Terada revisted the game's development process with the Polish website naEkranie in a recent interview while discussing Nintendo's collaborative partnership with Grezzo. During the interview, it was brought up that players and Zelda fans had noticed the game's map, top-down perspective, and art design similarities with A Link to the Past.

It was revealed that this was more than a "coincidence" as it was revealed that Echoes of Wisdom was planned to be a sequel to the 1991 SNES game A Link to the Past; however, this changed while in development, which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the key changes was making Princess Zelda the protagonist and introducing Echoes as a mechanic, which is one of the key elements spotlighted throughout its story.

Sano responded regarding Echoes of Wisdom's similarities with A Link to the Past, adding that the map isn't the only similarity with A Link to the Past, stating, “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.”