The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom offers up all kinds of twists on franchise tropes as well as completely new features as well. That’s very obvious from the get-go, as you’re playing as Zelda this time around and you’re solving all your troubles with echo abilities, rather than just a sword and shield. Turns out there’s yet another way in which Echoes of Wisdom is different, and it was a edict from high up on the food chain.
You may have noticed that Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom doesn’t use the word Triforce, but instead goes with the term “Prime Energy.” Why bother going through with such a change? According to a Famitsu interview with the dev team, it was none other than Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma who wanted the term to be avoided.
According to Aonuma, staying away from using the word “Triforce” was necessary from both a gameplay structure and storyline perspective. You can see Aonuma’s full comments on the matter below.
It’s the same with the point about Link not being able to speak that I touched upon earlier. For a long time now the Triforce, and the relationship between Zelda, Link, and Ganon forms a base, without which nothing could form. So we discussed the fact that the story focused on acquiring the Triforce. However, if we went ahead and simply went with ‘the story of the Triforce’, since the image we have created up until now of what the Triforce is so strong, one would automatically imagine the story must have the same structure and flow.
So instead, we purposefully made the setting and time ambiguous. It wasn’t a situation where the king, royal family, and everyone already knew about the Triforce, and in fact even the word had been forgotten. Instead it was a setting where all that remains is a vague legend of something called the ‘Prime Energy’ that sleeps in the world, which allowed us to greatly expand the adventure. So, we avoided the word ‘Triforce’ in the story. But then I suppose it does later appear big and clear to anyone that it clearly is the Triforce (laughs). But at that point, when you see it hopefully you think ‘I knew it!’
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