Already at the controls of the most significant turnaround of the series Metroid with Metroid Prime, Retro Studios could have applied another small revolution to the Zelda saga, a stone’s throw from the mid-2000s. Named Heroes of Hyrule, this project was unveiled in broad outline by the famous Youtube channel Did You Know Gaming. Thought for the DS and eyeing Final Fantasy Tactics, the game displayed its originality from the start: not making Link or Zelda its main character.
Three heroes would have taken their place: Dunar the Goron, Seriph the Piaf and Krel the Zora, each with a piece of the Triforce. On the scenario side, Heroes of Hyrule started from a failure of Link in yet another rescue of Zelda, causing the intervention in extremis of Dunar, Seriph and Krel to defeat Ganon, the latter then choosing to entrench himself in a magic book. Known thereafter as the Book of Ganon, the book was going to be more resistant than expected, forcing the group of warriors to tear out pages and distribute them all over the kingdom. The rest being kept and then hidden by Link in order to guarantee a lasting peace. A story lost in the flow of time which suddenly came back into the news through the intermediary of little Kori, who stumbled upon the famous book at an antique dealer.
The game split from that moment into two parts. One, shorter than the other, dedicated to the present, where the gameplay focused on pure Zelda-style exploration, but without combat or dungeons. The player would have embodied Kori there, struggling to get his hands on the missing pages. The other, which was set in the past, was to accommodate style fights Tactical-RPG. Each piece of the live brought back corresponded to a phase rooted in legend and therefore clashes whose “reward” was in the knowledge of facts or elements of the past, influencing Kori’s actions in the present and the discovery of bridges between ages.
A kind ofNever ending Story Zelda sauce therefore, rejected en bloc by Nintendo at the time, despite the confidence of Retro Studios in the concept and the mechanics, without further details on the reasons for this refusal. Not vengeful, Retro will try the adventure again with a certain Legend of Zelda: Sheik for the Wii, centering on the fate of the last male Sheik after the disaster caused – in this timeline – by Link’s defeat against Ganon at the end of Ocarina of Time. Again, the game will never see the light of day, yet very exciting on paper.