The Legend of Zelda and the Ethics of Echoes

We don’t have anything comparable to Moblins, Darknuts or Lynels in our world—half-human,  half-animal creatures that might not be at our level intelligence-wise but show higher development than livestock or housepets. We don’t need to, though, to know that it’d be wrong to constantly clone them before indiscriminately tossing them away. We wouldn’t condone that with pets or beasts of burden, and even though the meat from cloned animals is often legal to eat, cloned livestock are generally used for breeding purposes and not as meat—meaning they aren’t cloned with the sole intent of being slaughtered. If we don’t use cloning as part of our food supply, we wouldn’t use it to create easily disposable copies of more developed creatures with their own human-like culture. 

That’s what Zelda does, though—and, tellingly, she’s not the only one in Echoes of Wisdom who can create clones. For much of the game it appears that Ganon, the Legend of Zelda ur-villain whose porcine appearance recalls vilified ancient Gods like Moloch and Baal, has created echoes of Link and various monsters. After several hours of play you discover that the Ganon who has been antagonizing you throughout Echoes of Wisdom is actually an echo himself. A new villain named Null, who’s older than this version of the Zelda universe, created an echo of Ganon, as well as the Link echoes you’ve fought in several dungeons. Null is evil incarnate, and it fights its battles with echoes, just like Zelda does. In fact, they’re the only two people who use echoes in this game, or the series as a whole.

What makes Zelda’s use of echoes more acceptable than Null’s? Is it simply because she doesn’t clone humans, the way Null does with Link? Or is it something as banal as her status as a hero making whatever she does acceptable, whereas Null is a villain and thus always evil? Their goals might be diametrically opposed, with one being unquestionably evil, but their means are the same, and in fact Zelda burns through far more echoes throughout the game than Null does. If you stacked all of Zelda’s echoes on top of each other and stood her up on top, it’d look like that photo of a guy standing on a pyramid of bison skulls. You can argue that the end justifies the means all you want, but Echoes of Wisdom depicts Null’s cloning of Link as something shocking and inherently evil; shouldn’t Zelda, then, also be judged for her flagrant use of clones, even if they’re creatures she wouldn’t want to hang out with otherwise?

Here’s where I admit that I’m not too concerned with how Zelda treats her echoes. This is a game; this ain’t real. “Good guys” in videogames have been massacring their enemies for about as long as videogames have existed. If it was unethical or immoral to kill fake critters that only live on your TV screen, we’d all be going straight to Hell—like so many of the people and governments that have turned our real world into a constant disaster. 

Echoes of Wisdom’s combat is unique, though—and can feel uniquely troublesome. It’s ethically wrong on so many levels—creating life out of nothing, using it to take the lives of others, and then cavalierly dispatching the life you created once it no longer has use for you is some sinister business. You’d expect it from Ganon or Null, but not from Zelda. The game never broaches the subject, leaving it to us, the player, to ponder the quandary at its core, which makes it clear that the game doesn’t even realize it could be considered a problem. The ethical implications of Echoes of Wisdom are unusually fraught for a Zelda game, and it’s disappointing that the game itself never really interrogates them.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, music, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.