Link almost spoke for the first time in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Link is undoubtedly one of the most iconic silent protagonists in the video game industry. For many years, The Legend of Zelda fans have been asking Nintendo to make him speak with words in a game and, curiously enough, they almost got their wish in the most recent installment.

Per VGC, the director of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Satoshi Terada, and longtime producer of the franchise, Eiji Aonuma, recently did an interview with Famitsu in which they revealed several fascinating tidbits about the title’s development. The one that immediately caught most people’s attention was the unexpected revelation that they almost made Link speak since Zelda was the playable protagonist this time around.

After the interviewer asked him about it, Aonuma confirmed that Link was speaking at one point of development. Terada followed it up by saying, “I had Link talk a little bit. No matter what I made him say, it just didn’t feel right”, to which Aonuma agreed and added, “Link would never speak like that, that’s only natural, because he’s never spoken before. So we had to come up with a setting where he couldn’t speak, and that’s how we came up with part of the story”.

This is a fascinating revelation because The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was a groundbreaking new entry in the series just for having Princess Zelda as the playable protagonist instead of Link, so getting to see him speak for the first time in the franchise would have made this game even more exciting. Fans have been debating on whether Link should talk for several years, so I can’t help but wonder how they would have reacted to him doing it for the first time in Echoes of Wisdom.

Everyone can beat The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

However, that’s not the only interesting thing that Terada and Aonuma revealed in this interview. Something else that caught our attention is how the Link’s Awakening remake influenced Echoes of Wisdom’s development. Aonuma claimed that they built this new game as an extension of developer Grezzo’s previous The Legend of Zelda project, which is what led to Echoes of Wisdom having a top-view perspective, similar to old 2D Zelda games.

Aonuma also clarified that this direction is what influenced the game’s art style and mechanics, claiming that it would have been impossible to bring a similar game system into a world like the one in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and that they were able to do many things only because of Echoes of Wisdom’s top-view perspective.

When compared to the aforementioned Breath of the Wild and its sequel, Tears of Kingdom, it’s immediately evident that Echoes of Wisdom is a much simpler and easier entry in The Legend of Zelda series, mostly thanks to stuff like the removal of fall damage or the addition of the versatile Echoes mechanic.

This was entirely intentional, as Aonuma revealed that he and Shigeru Miyamoto discussed making a Zelda game that “everyone can reach the goal of” for a long time; an accessible experience that every type of player could beat without giving up halfway through, reach the ending and be happy with it. He feels that The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is the game they have been thinking about for so many years.