Players are using the Cheat Codes in the movie
Echoes of Wisdom: From Princess to Dungeon Master: An Eiji Aonuma Talk with Tomo Sano and Eiji Akuma
There is a narrative poetry to the way in her first mainline outing, she is changing the world by using her rules to her advantage. It’s a framing that presents her as both a princess and a kind of dungeon master — and shows how, 40 years in, Nintendo is still finding fantastic ways to make The Legend of Zelda’s old ideas feel new.
When Nintendo showed off echoes of wisdom, it seemed like it was a follow-up to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. In the recent interview with Tomo Sano and Eiji Aonuma, it was revealed that the idea for a video game built around copying and posting was part of a plan for a game focused on Link.
When I first started playing Echoes of Wisdom, the focus on learning echoes of ordinary inanimate objects to help Zelda made the game feel like a standard top-down dungeon crawler that was trying to make me think more about how to move through space vertically. Table echoes could be used to give the short princess a boost, and stacks of heart-restoring beds could be fashioned into makeshift staircases. Those kinds of echoes all gave me different ways of navigating Zelda out of a jail cell, which felt like a crash course in the game’s stealth missions. It was surprising to see that I had to be familiar with a creature’s behavioral patterns to use it effectively in combat, once I learned my first monster echoes.
As Aonuma played through an early demo, he started thinking that “while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it, it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies.” The team was already about a year into building an edit dungeon-style game, and Anonuma felt that the copy / paste mechanic had significant potential to be developed into a new style of playing the Legend of Zelda games.
Some echoes — like the Boomerang Boarblin and Bombfish — basically give you a quick way of whipping up the classic Zelda weapon their names reference. More of them are replicas of ReDeads and Darknuts, the monsters that are found in overworlds and dungeons of the zeal game.
The Tri Rod is a new magical key item found in A Link to the Past’s Cane of Somaria and it works the same way as the sword Zelda and Tri used in Legend of the Sword. But unlike the Cane, which gave Link the power to create single square blocks to climb on or push, the Tri Rod grants Zelda the ability to conjure multiple copies (referred to as “echoes”) of various objects and monsters she encounters on her adventure.
The Chamber Dungeons of the Tears: From Clones to Tables to the Water Temple, or a Game-Theoretical Perspective
In the Chamber Dungeons, you were in charge of choosing what went in and following a number of rules about how chamber tiles could be arranged. The Super Mario Maker game lacked an online component, making it impossible for you to share your creations, which was a big part of its appeal.
There is influence of both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in the latest Nintendo game. The most brilliant innovation of the new game is what feels like an inspired take on the remake of Link’s Awakening.
As creative as these workarounds are, they also play directly into Nintendo’s hands. Nintendo wanted to empower them to be mischievous because of the Tears mechanics that let them build flame-throwing phalluses. As director Tomomi Sano has said, the point is for players to find ways to use echoes that “are so ingenious it almost feels like cheating.”
There are creations that allow players to escape the laws of gravity and gated-off areas. One worked out how to create different variations of flying machines, no bed needed, by binding together a crow, a rock, and an enemy that creates wind gusts. In the game’s water temple, which requires players to slowly raise the water level to reach the top, one enterprising adventurer figured out how to skip that whole mess by carefully stacking water blocks—echoes that create a contained cube of water Zelda can swim through—to head straight up.
The most useful item is a brown-framed bed. Players have quickly latched onto beds as a go-to for getting around—stack a couple and they make a great bridge or a ladder. The summon monsters will fight for her if one is dropped in a fight. A player puts a game named “Zelda” on top of the bed and summons an enemy to cause wind gusts that will make the bed fly. When you want to keep a few guards out of your own prison, a table is just as useful.
From a Dungeon to a Worldsheet: Princess Zelda’s Green Machine in a Game of Doomsday
When series producer Eiji Aonuma had the chance to test it, however, he had a different take. While it’s fun to create your own dungeon and allow other people to play it, it’s also not a bad idea to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field.
On top of a table, Princess Zelda magically binds herself to a green machine pouring gusts of wind. She goes zooming across the screen instantly as the air blasts the table forward as well as any jet engine. The caption read, “table go v room-vroom”, just a little taste of what an inventive player can do in the latest game in the series from Nintendo.
