Legend of Zelda: EoW Menu Redesign
Individual UI Design Project
In the almost 40 years of history of Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” IP, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of the Wisdom is the first mainline game that features Zelda, the usual to-be-saved princess of the game, as the main controllable character in the game. The game developed my Nintendo, and is playable only in Nintendo’s home console, Nintendo Switch.
Gameplay Example: Zelda uses bed echoes to reach a higher ground
Challenge to Tackle
Legend of Zelda: Echoes of the Wisdom: Promotional Cover
This game features Zelda as a primary character, exploring dungeons and solving puzzles in the fantasy land of Hyrule, where rifts have appeared and swallowed up various lands, villages, and people. As Zelda, players can summon “echoes”, these can be either memories of previously encountered objects or clones of monsters, to assist in combat and exploration.
In this game, players explore vast areas, gather resources, complete missions, and continuously switch between echoes using the menu, both during exploration and complex combat scenarios. Some bosses or environmental mechanics may only be beaten or unlocked using specific echoes. (As seen on the images to the left) As such, the echoes menu system of this game becomes a central, recurring interaction that influences the fluidity of the gameplay experience.
Players rely heavily on echoes in combat and puzzle-solving, which is the core mechanic required to advance both the main story and side quests. Currently, they must scroll through a one-row menu with over 100 items, which lacks intuitive organization, causing frustration and slowing gameplay.
The image below shows the said menu, as well as the control scheme required to select hover over this menu.
As seen, the only way to fight monsters, and bosses, and explore in this game is to scroll through this one-line menu of potentially over 100 items, all while in a fast-paced battle situation. While the game’s time stops when this menu is open, the cumbersome nature of this one-line menu has created quite an amount of complaints throughout the community.
Although there are offered choices to sort items, users have reflected that it does little to help the incredibly long menu, and can be counterintuitive to remember mid-battle.
Zelda summons ice element monster echoes damage fire element boss
Background
For better understanding of the problem, a background research is conducted regarding user sentiments on the issue. As the menu system of Echoes of Wisdom had been a common issue in the community, I have found quite a few pieces of evidence that further reinforce the community’s distaste for the current one-line echoes menu system. Convincing reports of such claims by major community representatives are aggregated
Indirect Research: Short Sentiment Analysis
Youtube: The 7 Best (and Worst) Things About Echoes of Wisdom, by Arlo
Reddit: Can we please get rid of the single-line menu, byRadbot13 in r/zelda
Youtube: I fixed Zelda's terrible menus, by GameXplain
Relevant Issues
Players have to scroll through the ultra-long menu to find the echoes/items they want to use. This list is one line long and can contain over a hundred items, making the locating process incredibly cumbersome.
Issue Level: Critical
Redesign Opportunities:
Categorize the items in the menu, and make them two-dimensional so fewer scrolls are required; Currently, echoes can include furniture, tools, or monsters: uncategorized. This one-line menu can include over 100 entries.
Violation 2: Improved Precision (IP)
Relevant Issues
Although there are sorting options among long menus like echo menus, the indication of “Y button to sort” can be small and confusing, and the guidance on how it works can be unclear for new players. After a brief observation on test players who have never played Zelda series games before, I have noticed that players don’t immediately notice the sorting function, and do not actively take advantage of it to decrease the effort for finding certain echoes.
Issue Level: Minor
Redesign Opportunities:
Perhaps make the icon for the sort function more indicative, and follow more closely to the common conventions of how an option would look to indicate there is a sorting function. Allowing players to make a list of “liked“ echoes would also alleviate a need to zoom into smaller text to confirm an echo entry.
Relevant Issues
The current wide-spanned menu can result in players that “over-scroll” their menu, especially in fast-paced battle situations. Wrong objects or echoes can be summoned, leading to unintended failure in combat.
Issue Level: Moderate
Redesign Opportunities:
Making the one-row menu into a menu with multiple rows may vastly reduce a player’s need to mash/hold a button to scroll through a massively long menu, resulting in inaccurate selections.
Violation 3: Clear Text (CT)
Violation 4: Total Recall (TR)
Relevant Issues
Currently, there exists an “echoes” menu and another “automaton” menu, triggered by two completely separate buttons. Echoes and automatons can only be summoned through their respective menus. However, because there aren’t a lot of tasks that require automatons to complete, this leads to players forgetting the more obscure automaton menu; they often are never used in the whole game, despite being a central mechanic.
Issue Level: Moderate
Redesign Opportunities:
A viable solution to this is to combine automaton menus with the more widely used echoes menu, so the mechanics can be more easily reminded to players.
Accessibility Audit
What caused these negative sentiments from the gaming community?
To better locate the exact issues to tackle that warrant the current gamer sentiments, an accessibility audit was conducted to locate potential usability issues. For this accessibility audit, a criterion hat combines APX and GAG and focuses on the issues most relevant to a UX/UI redesign.
Below is the summary of criterions violated.
Violation 1: Do More With Less (DMWL)
Prototype
To address these issues, a mid-fidelity interactive menu prototype is made, as a potential redesign of this echoes menu. Details of the prototype are shown below.
To address Violation 4: Total Recall, the automaton menu is merged with echo menu as a separate category as seen in the image to the right. This is an attempt to raise the relevancy of automatons in game, as it used to be a mechanic forgotten by players due to the obscure menu placement.
The menu also now includes a favorite echoes category; this allows players to mark their preferred, often used echoes. This category allows players to condense their favorite echoes into a smaller list that has less entries ( response to violation 1), more precision (response to violation 2), and requires less attention to small text labels attached to each echo (response to violation 3).
To select a category, player simply utilizes the same stick they used to select echoes in the original design. This is shown to the right.
After they hold in a direction for a second, the respective menu would show, with the echoes/automatons of that category.
Favorites Category
Automaton Category
Interactive Prototype (Click Full Screen for Better Experience)
To alleviate the 100+ entry echoes menu and allow easier navigation, the entries in echoes menu are grouped into two main groups: Monsters and Items. This is because these two types of echoes often have vastly different use cases:
Monsters are most often used in combat
Objects are most often used in exploration
This is a redesign decision intended to tackle Violation 1: Do more with less, and Violation 2: Improved Precision, at the same time. By decreasing the number of entries catered to different use cases, it should be easier to locate the correct echo in shorter amounts of time.
Items / Furnitures Category
Monsters Category
Link to Figma Workfile:
https://www.figma.com/design/g3q9nCPd3Fc4hQMjjmHFTe/Zelda%3AEoW-Echoes-Menu-Prototype?node-id=13-404&t=zHNwiuFMWHWlqrZe-1
Acknowledgement & Next Steps
Acknowledgements
To preface this report, between the time of choosing this topic and the final deliverable, I realized there have been other UI designers who are also fans of the game who created alternative mockups to the menus in Echoes of Wisdom, particularly the Echoes menu, as this is a widely recognized issue. While I realize there may have been existing mockups online of the menu done during the process of this project, the design is built while trying not to look at those as part of my market research to prevent my own research takeaways and ideas from being influenced by those other designs.
Next Steps
This prototype is intended to provide a potential solution that solves most of the issues found in the audit, to potentially improve upon an issue commomly raised between players. However, further usability testing still needs to be done to the design to validate design improvements.