Why the Classic Zelda Formula is So Durable — and So Tough to Imitate

By Gene Park / The Washington Post

17:03 JST, November 15, 2024

I asked longtime Zelda series producer and developer Eiji Aonuma, “What defines a Zelda-like?”

He laughed and groaned, “That’s the hardest question!”

It’s also a question tackled by the three lead developers of this year’s “The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom,” each of them with a deep history in creating the many iterations of the Zelda-like formula. For example, Zelda games should have dungeons and puzzles. But Aonuma tells The Washington Post his succinct answer.

“Yes there are puzzles, yes there are battles,” Aonuma said. “But when you do those, we want you to come away with that really satisfying feel of ‘I did it.’ It’s the ‘I’ part that’s important. Even though other players are doing the same thing, it’s about the fact that everybody comes to their own conclusion of ‘I solved it my way, I did it my way, I got through it.’”

“Echoes of Wisdom,” which has now sold 2.58 million copies, expands on the definition offered by Aonuma, who has directed the most consequential Zelda games in the series and now oversees production. Nintendo’s Tomomi Sano is the first female director for the series and oversaw the first Nintendo-published game starring the eponymous princess. Sano worked with Grezzo, an independent studio whose 2019 remake of “Link’s Awakening” inspired the ongoing partnership to create “Echoes.”

“Echoes” co-director Satoshi Terada of Grezzo said part of creating that sense of accomplishment through player agency is some type of response or reward for ingenuity.

“I really would just emphasize that when players have something they want to do and they want to try it out, we want there to be a response to that in the game, so that when they try it out, it goes as they imagined, or perhaps better than they imagined,” Terada said.

“Echoes of Wisdom” is not just the first game in which players control the female protagonist, it’s also the first new project in 11 years to use the classic top-down camera perspective and format of the original game. While the biggest gaming publishers and developers abandon genres and camera angles of the medium’s past (the remake of “Silent Hill 2” as a recent example), Nintendo remains unique in revisiting the creative well of its past. Last year’s “Super Mario Bros. Wonder” shared the same 2D perspective of the 1985 classic and sold more than 13 million copies.

When asked why Nintendo revisits classic game formulas, Aonuma said it’s all about opportunity and inspiration. He thought of his Nintendo colleague and veteran creator Yoshio Sakamoto, who had long desired to revisit his visual novel series Famicom Detective Club and the text adventure genre.

“To make any of these types of games, there really needs to be some sort of opportunity,” he said.

The two ideas of “protagonist Zelda” and the top-down formula continued to bounce inside Aonuma’s head for years. He looked to Grezzo, which won critical acclaim with its inspired diorama-like interpretation of “Link’s Awakening.”

“They made something that we thought was a really good, modern take on the 2D, top-down format, and it would be kind of a waste to not take advantage of their experience and what they did,” he said. “Echoes” was originally planned as a project similar to “Super Mario Maker,” letting players build their own versions of the game.

Aonuma played early versions of the “Zelda maker” concept and realized it was fun enough to craft an original story around the concept.

“I have all sorts of different ideas in my head, things I want to do, and I really feel that’s probably true for all the producers at Nintendo,” Aonuma said. “Even Mr. [Shigeru] Miyamoto [creator of Mario and Zelda] probably has ideas and things he wants to create, as well.”

One of the bigger challenges for the team was writing a story around Zelda. In past Zelda games, the boy hero Link is an audience surrogate, a relative unknown in the story’s world. But Zelda is royalty, a celebrity in her own kingdom. She changed the power dynamics of the adventure.

“We struggled with giving her a reason to feel like she needed to go and be the hero because she had so many people that could be there to support her,” Sano said. The game introduces dimensional rifts that steal people away, and that included other authority figures. “We wanted to come up with a reason and introduce it into the story pretty quickly.”

Another contrast to the rest of the industry: Nintendo games are typically written with story as the afterthought, establishing game design concepts before creating a narrative to graft around them. Production for many of today’s big games front-load narrative conception at the start of the process. To this day, that approach eludes Aonuma.

“I’ve never really made a game where you think of the story first and then go into gameplay,” Aonuma said. “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.”

Aonuma said this approach helps teams improve game elements more easily, freed from any adherence to requisites set by the narrative. Instead, the game’s design elements are the outline for narrative to follow.

“The story becomes used as a vessel because it has a beginning and end, and the player moves through it,” Aonuma said. “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.”