You probably haven’t heard of Tomomi Sano before, but the Nintendo employee just broke a big barrier for The Legend of Zelda series. She is now the first female director for the franchise after helping to helm The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which comes out in mere days.
Nintendo revealed the milestone for Sano in a new Ask the Developer volume focusing on Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. She is part of the company’s Entertainment Planning and Development Department with Production Group 3 and previously collaborated with Grezzo on a handful of Zelda remakes: Ocarina of Time 3D, Majora’s Mask 3D, and Link’s Awakening. (Yes, Nintendo is finally confirming Grezzo’s involvement as the developer behind the new Switch exclusive.)
Additionally, Nintendo and Grezzo revealed the origins of how Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom came to be. In fact, the project almost sounds like it started as a Zelda Maker title–similar to the Super Mario Maker series–but this time focused on dungeons to create and share. Grezzo’s Satoshi Terada, who co-directed the game with Sano, discussed his team’s opportunity to create a new game in the Zelda series and their different ideas.
“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,” Terada said. “During this exploration phase, this idea was called an “edit dungeon” because players could create their own Legend of Zelda gameplay.”
Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma added that “while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it,” what stood out to him was copying and pasting items. Obviously, that led to one of the game’s main hooks: “The gameplay was shifted from creating dungeons up until then to using copied-and-pasted items as tools to further your own adventure.”
This led to Sano mentioning that Aonuma basically upended the tea table, a phrase usually attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto. But she backed up Aonuma on the shift, saying: “Of course, creating dungeons was fun, but being able to copy various objects and use them in different places was even more fun.”
Earlier this month, the Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom ROM reportedly leaked, so be careful of spoilers online with the game releasing later this week on September 26. For more, check out GameSpot’s Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom preview, which notes the game plays like a mini Tears of the Kingdom.
