Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom almost featured Link speaking

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom plays with a lot of Legend of Zelda tropes and tried-and-true mechanics while also introducing brand-new ideas. It turns out Nintendo almost addressed both tropes and new ideas in one specific way, and it would have been a major milestone for the Legend of Zelda franchise.

While Link might make noises and grunts in Legend of Zelda games, you never hear him speak dialog. You also don’t see text boxes showing his conversations, although we see multiple times that he is indeed talking with people. After decades of staying silent, Nintendo almost had Link speak his mind in Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

Nintendo’s Eiji Aonuma and Satoshi Terada opened up on the development of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom in a Famitsu interview, which is where they dropped the bombshell. There was indeed a time during development where the plan was to have Link speak, but the team quickly ran into problems.

*“We made Link talk a bit at first (…) but it felt really wrong. We kept thinking ‘he’d never say that!’ (laughs). No one knew the answer to the question – What would Link say? And of course we wouldn’t, he has never spoken before! (laughs) Because of that, we needed a setting where he couldn’t talk, and that led to a part of the game’s storyline being formed.” - *Eiji Aonuma

“Whatever we tried to make him say, it just didn’t feel right.” - Satoshi Terada**

This means that somewhere within the depths of Nintendo are Link’s first official words. They might only be text on paper or a few lines of dialog in a prototype, but they do exist. You have to wonder if they’ll ever be dug up some day!