In the grand narrative of life, we should feel lucky to have the chance to echo wisdom wherever we can.
Don’t you just hate when you find yourself agreeing with the
genocider?
As what may come as a shock to absolutely no regular readers, I have reached the end of another day with few moments to spare. I’ve been meaning to attempt to restructure the way my schedule is handled, but alas, I can’t find time in my schedule to schedule in doing so. Tragic irony. With all of that said, I am regulated to once again write more of a quickie involving a thought of note than a full blown article, but that’s just the way it rolls sometimes.
We should all ever be so lucky for it to roll this kind of crazy
Over on Polygon, I was delightfully reminded of how awesome the new Zelda game, Echoes of Wisdom, is going to be, and one I’ve been reporting on and looking forward to for sometime. I attempt not to be a total one trick pony by writing about the same games over and over, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and I love me some of that turbulence the Triforce always seems to be throwing down.
When keeping it real in Termina goes wrong
In any case, the article pulls a choice quote from one of Nintendo’s always choice behind the scenes look at game development, in this instance, the devs talking about how Echoes of Wisdom was suppose to be a full blown dungeon creator, ala Mario Maker:
Terada: We were exploring a few different ways to play the game in parallel. In one approach, Link could copy and paste various objects, such as doors and candlesticks, to create original dungeons. During this exploration phase, this idea was called an “edit dungeon” because players could create their own Legend of Zelda gameplay.
Aonuma: They showed it to me and told me to give it a try. As I played, I 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. That was the beginning of gameplay using “echoes.” The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure.
Zelda about to ctrl+c & ctrl v Hyrule out of existence…and back into it again?
I had mused myself whether or not we would get such a game (a Zeldaified version of Mario Maker) after spending an inordinate amount of time with the dungeon creator in the remake to Link’s Awakening, as the entire sub-system of creation ended up being quite engaging, and I felt as if Nintendo could probably get a lot of mileage out of the idea very much like Mario Maker in the process. I always figured it would have been a long shot idea, however, and knew that it would only ever work within the vein of a 2D setup anyways, for a myriad of reasons.
Being the maker of your own mischief always felt amusing
Internally speaking, I also figured that maybe on some level, the devs involved with the any of the Zelda titles would be overly protective of their property, as it were, and that making Zelda feel too cookie cutter might diminish some of the “magic” the series does seem to innately have in feeling like a powerfully unique property that should be handled with a certain level of finesse you wouldn’t see with other series, and perhaps in a read between the lines moment, that’s what ended up happening.
I very much look forward to the launch day of Echoes of Wisdom, which is a mere two days out. Get hyped.
~Pashford
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