New Legend of Zelda game finally makes Zelda the playable hero of Hyrule

The next Legend of Zelda game will give Princess Zelda herself the starring role. Nintendo announced The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom during its latest Nintendo Direct showcase, confirming that the Zelda-led adventure will come to Switch later this year.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom looks a lot like 2019’s remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening from a graphical perspective, but it will play very differently. Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma said that Echoes of Wisdom will feature “a new gameplay style that breaks conventions;” in other words, Zelda won’t just fight like Link. Instead, she’ll use a new magical rod, the Tri Rod, and the power of wisdom to create and duplicate objects to help her overcome obstacles and enemies.

Those duplicated objects are known as echoes, Nintendo says, and include things like water blocks that can be used as platforms, beds that can be repurposed into bridges, and even enemies that will fight alongside Zelda and her fairy friend Tri.

Coming to Nintendo Switch on Sept. 26, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is the first Nintendo-developed game to explicitly star Zelda as the main protagonist. Typically, hero duties are reserved for Link, and longtime Nintendo fans have hoped for decades that Zelda would get a heroic turn in the series that bears her name.

Princess Zelda has been playable in a handful of games from Nintendo and other developers over the past four decades. She’s a playable character in spinoffs like the Hyrule Warriors action games, the Super Smash Bros. series, and in rhythm game Cadence of Hyrule. In 2009’s The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, players take control of a version of Zelda, in spirit form, during segments of the game.

Two Zelda-starring games that Nintendo would likely prefer to forget are 1993’s Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and 1996’s Zelda’s Adventure, a pair of interactive adventures developed for the Philips CD-i multimedia player.