Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom devs explain why making Zelda’s design was “difficult”

The developers of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom have opened up about designing Zelda for the game, which was a “difficult” challenge for the team.

We’re able to get insight from co-director Tomomi Sano and series producer Eiji Aonuma here. There were a few things that Nintendo and Grezzo needed to balance. For one thing, they couldn’t make Zelda too cute. They also couldn’t make her stand out given her fugitive status, but they also didn’t want her to look too much like a fugitive. Finally, Zelda is a princess at the end of the day, so that’s something the team also needed to keep in mind. 

Sono and Aonuma said the following about Zelda’s design in Echoes of Wisdom in an interview with Famitsu, as translated by Nintendo Everything:

I’d like to ask about the characters once again. Was there anything you kept in mind when depicting Princess Zelda as the protagonist?

Sano: Since this Zelda is in a completely different position than the ones before, and is ultimately an alter ego of the player, going all-in on cuteness would make it hard to think of her as an extension of oneself, so I focused on making her look plain. Also, this time she is a fugitive, so if her design was too distinctive, the question of “Why are her clothes so flashy if she’s a fugitive?” would arise. However, if we made her look too much like a fugitive, it would make her less appealing as the player character. Making her too cute was bad, and making her stand out too much was also bad, and it was difficult to aim for somewhere in the middle.

Aonuma: Despite that, she still had to be princess-like.

Sano: We wanted her to be elegant after all, so for quite some time during development, Princess Zelda’s design was not finalized, and not just Grezzo but also people from Nintendo oversaw the designing, and in the end they went as far as adjusting the position of her eyes and the angle of her eyelids.

Aonuma: Taking Marin from Link’s Awakening as an example, she was a kid who lived doing things like singing to animals, so there were no problems with her being straightforwardly cute, but to have Princess Zelda who carries a difficult destiny be smiling all the time, or making cute faces, players would think, “This doesn’t seem right”.

When we made a new Link for the series too, if the story slowly got more and more intense, but the protagonist had serious eyes and was like, “I’m gonna do it!” from the start, it would not match the players’ feelings. When we made the first footage for Breath of the Wild, we had Link with very serious-looking eyes, but when considering the background story, we thought this Link did not match, so we remade him.

The Princess Zelda this time is a reflection of the player, so it would not feel good if the situation the protagonist was in at the start of the story did not match their expressions. Princess Zelda would definitely be confused and think, “What should I do?”, and when becoming a fugitive she would think, “But I’m a princess…”.

That is true.

Aonuma: That was the intent for doing very detailed changes to places such as the eyes, but actually as the story progresses in the game, her expressions change. At first, she does not smile no matter what happens, but in the second half she begins to smile after helping many regions. She is given the “Royal Travel Attire” by the King, and at that time she had already found her own purpose, so she makes a “Alright, let’s do this” kind of face. We discussed reflecting these minor changes while creating Princess Zelda.

Sano: For situations we thought players would feel highly motivated during, such as when facing off against a boss, we added more serious expressions and movements, and tuned the fine details with the producers at Grezzo.

Since the world is in a chibi style, the faces also seem to be really simple constructs, but they are actually created in great detail.

Sano: Like if the angle of the lips were too steep, it would look like they were smiling too much.

Aonuma: In that sense, the character creation had a lot more thought put into it than for Link in Link’s Awakening.

Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is currently available on Nintendo Switch. The team has also spoken about the future of 2D Zelda, Prime Energy, and how the echoes were chosen.