It looks like Zelda games have changed forever

polygon.com:

The biggest shock of Tuesday’s The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom reveal was, of course, that Princess Zelda will be the playable protagonist. The second-biggest shock was that the game exists at all, and that it’s coming out in three months.

The third-biggest shock took a little longer to register for me, but it’s possibly an even bigger deal: Echoes of Wisdom is a clear indication that Nintendo has turned its back on what you might call traditional Zelda game design for good.

Tradition is deeply important to the Legend of Zelda series. This sequence of games has, over the course of 38 Earth years (and millennia on Hyrule), essentially told and retold the same story over and over again. Similarly, its game design has morphed and shifted within strict limits as it observed the time-worn rituals of Zelda.

For decades, each game would open up in a gradual, nonlinear, but carefully prescribed way, as the player unlocks new tools that fit like keys into the map’s many locks and uses them to find the solutions to intricate puzzles. In the first review of a Zelda game that I wrote — I think it was for The Minish Cap, in 2004 — I described the games as “clockwork fairy tales,” meaning they worked like beautiful, precision pieces of machinery that the player could slot themselves into. And they stayed that way — until 2017.

Breath of the Wild tore up the Zelda rulebook. It gave players all the most important tools at the start of the game and let them explore the map in any direction, tackling its challenges in any order. Through systems like weapon durability, weather, stamina, and cooking, it also added a lot of variables that would keep players on their toes and encourage improvisation.

Then 2023’s Tears of the Kingdom turbocharged this approach with a handful of abilities that seemed conceived less to disrupt the game design than to break it completely. Ultrahand lets players build their own furniture, buildings, vehicles, and powered contraptions. Fuse splices