News Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom Devs Explain The Method Behind The Menu Madness

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We had a blast playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom this year, but it's not perfect. Many of us got annoyed with the changing frame rate and found the Echoes menu system often needed too much scrolling.

Two months later, some of the game's creators chatted with the BBC about these issues and tried to explain their thinking. As you'd expect, Nintendo put a positive spin on everything.

The devs' explanation for the menu seems a bit of a stretch, but apparently Echoes of Wisdom's long, single line of summon choices was on purpose. Co-director and Grezzo boss Satoshi Terada says the menu setup was meant to help players "stumble upon" Echoes they might have missed and inspire them to use each in new ways:

This game is all about finding different uses for each echo. So we wanted players to come across and notice echoes they may have overlooked or not used much while looking through all their options.

Well, alright then. We thought the long scrolling menu was just leftover from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom's design, which didn't quite fit Echoes' more menu-heavy gameplay. But apparently it was all part of the plan...

It turns out the whole Echoes system took some getting used to at Nintendo. Even Aonuma admitted in the interview that it took him finishing the game once (out of eight playthroughs during development) to really get the hang of it:

On my second playthrough, I realized there are many ways to solve these puzzles and challenges. I think that moment when you see you can do various things and solve puzzles in different ways is when you start to get used to using the echoes in the new game system.

On the touchy subject of EoW's frame rate, co-director Tomomi Sano simply said the developers felt the variable approach was the "best option" they had. Fair enough.

In the BBC interview, the developers also admit they were nervous about revealing Zelda as the hero, talk about watching online playthrough videos, and look ahead to the future of the top-down style. You can check out the whole interview on the BBC website.