The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has the unique honour of being the first game in the series where the titular princess is the game's main character. However, this almost wasn't the case.
In part three of Nintendo's Ask The Developer Volume 13: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Eiji Aonuma and Katsuya Terada revealed that while it wasn't the original vision for Echoes of Wisdom, eventually the team realised that Princess Zelda was the perfect candidate to take control of the game's signature echo mechanic (thanks, GoNintendo).
"We were initially thinking that Link would be the protagonist," Aonuma revealed. "But when we focused on the gameplay using echoes and had Link copying and pasting things into the game field, the sword and shield got in the way. If you have a sword and shield, you can just fight using those. There's no need to rely on the monster's power, right?"
Nintendo believed that if the player played with a sword and shield, they would ignore the echo mechanic in favour of something familiar to them. Their next solution was to not allow Link to get his weapons until later in the game, but that just delayed the...
