Eiji Aounma has been doing the rounds recently conducting a bunch of interviews looking back at the development of Echoes of Wisdom. We’ve had some interesting bits of information come out related to how Nintendo thinks about Zelda games including prioritising gameplay over story, how Link nearly talked in Echoes of Wisdom until Nintendo changed their minds, plus we have some thoughts from the Zelda development team behind the UI and menus in Echoes of Wisdom.

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Gameplay is more important than story

Eiji Aonuma said in an interview with the Washington Post recently that he always focuses on gameplay before story saying “I’ve never really made a game where you think of the story first”. He went onto say that the stories always emerge after the gameplay has been established and why he thinks doing it the other way around would be “difficult”.

Aonuma said that Nintendo goes against the grain with it’s games and focuses on gameplay before starting on the story. “I’ve never really made a game where you think of the story first and then go into gameplay. First when you think of the gameplay, what you’re trying to think of after that is how you can get players to understand that gameplay.”

According to Aonuma, this approach helps the developers improve upon their games easily as no restrictions are set in place by a predetermined narrative. Rather, the gameplay helps shape the story rather than the other way around. “The story becomes used as a vessel because it has a beginning and end, and the player moves through it,”. Aonuma says it’s pretty unique to how Nintendo developers their games, but he’d not have it any other way.

In fact, Eiji Aonuma said that he’d find it pretty difficult doing it the other way around, starting with the narrative and then moving onto gameplay. “I think it would actually be kind of difficult to do the reverse and start with the story, then try to match the gameplay mechanics to that.”

It’s hard to argue with his approach, with many Zelda games appearing in most top 100 game of all time lists with titles like A Link To The Past, Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild consistently featuring on best game lists. However, given the discussion around the timeline, you can see the impact this can have on audiences perception of the story elements of The Legend of Zelda series.

Link nearly talked

Nintendo nearly had Link talking in the recently released Echoes of Wisdom, but ultimately decided against it because it “felt really wrong”. Eiji Aonuma and Echoes of Wisdom director Satoshi Terada were talking to Famitsu recently and they explained how they nearly broke a long running tradition in Zelda games, by having Link explain how things work to Princess Zelda.

“In the Zelda series, the protagonist does not speak,” Aonuma said. “This is why Link doesn’t talk either.” But with the role of Zelda supporting Link reversed in Echoes of Wisdom, it now fell on Link’s shoulders to guide Zelda along.

Nintendo therefore gave Link a voice for the first time after nearly four decades of Zelda games. “We made Link talk a bit at first but it felt really wrong,” Aonuma added. “We kept thinking, ‘He’d never say that.’”

Terada expanded: “Whatever we tried to make him say, it just didn’t feel right. No one knew the answer to the question, ‘What would Link say?’ And of course we wouldn’t; he has never spoken before. Because of that, we needed a setting where he couldn’t talk, and that led to a part of the game’s storyline being formed.”

Link not talking is fine in a video game, but all this is going to change with the upcoming Legend of Zelda movie, he has to talk in that, and that’s going to be an interesting choice and dilemma for Nintendo, who clearly care dearly about Link, and what he might have to say. Details about the movie are slim, we know its releasing before the end of the decade, although we don’t have any casting or story details yet.

Echoes of Wisdom menus explained

Echoes of Wisdom was pretty well received by Zelda fans, and Nintendo fans more broadly. However, there is one piece of feedback that is consistent, and that’s the challenges surrounding the menus and the UI. Selecting an echo from a long list can be frustrating. The developers of Echoes of Wisdom recently sat down with the BBC to talk about the game, and specifically the UI challenges.

By the end of the game you can gather up to 127 echoes, then the main method of selecting the echoes is scrolling a long list after pressing right on the d-pad, which could get frustrating after a while. Yes, you can filter by used and newest, but lots of feedback has come Nintendo’s way related to selecting echoes.

“One of the essences of this game is being able to figure out different ways of using each of these echoes. And so in that sense we wanted players to fall upon and see the echoes that they may not have noticed or have been using while they’re sorting through all the echoes that they have.” Terada said.

Nintendo may have acknowledged the feedback there, but I don’t think they did a very good job of explaining. It sounds like they understand the frustrations, but they are trying to get players and fans to look on the positive side of a UI that clearly needs some work.

Even Aonuma admitted it took him some time to get used to the systems in the game. He played the game through 8 times before release, and it took him a whole playthrough to get used to the UI. I don’t want to be too critical of Aonuma, given the great work and hours of joy he’s given the world through the Legend of Zelda series, but if it takes a whole playthrough to get used to a UI system, then that’s probably not a great UI and it needs improving. While I will probably playthrough the game again sometime, regular Zelda fans aren’t going to be playing through multiple times, and ideally the UI shouldn’t be a battle. Nintendo had similar challenges with Tears of the Kingdom, with a cumbersome system to select materials to fuse with weapons.