The Legend of Zelda and the Ethics of Echoes

[Spoiler Warning: Contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.]

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a bit of a misnomer. Sure, it’s full of echoes—temporary clones of creatures Zelda, for the first time the playable hero of the series that bears her name, summons to help solve puzzles or beat monsters—but there’s very little wisdom in how those echoes are used or presented. In fact, the echoes present an ethical problem familiar from real life that the game itself never really addresses. And it all comes down to the ongoing, decades-old debate around the issue of cloning.

What are these echoes but clones? Zelda’s method is a lot faster, cheaper, and easier to perform than what our scientists have developed, but it ultimately has a similar result: it creates copies of living beings that have their own traits, thoughts, and personalities. And since cloning remains an ethical minefield, it’s fair to ask why Zelda, an exemplar of all that’s good and right in Hyrule, is allowed unquestioned free rein to clone at will. If cloning is still largely off-limits in our world, why is Zelda permitted to create clone-like echoes with no debate or outrage? How does this fit the character as she’s long been presented, including in this very game? 

In real life it’s widely agreed that cloning humans is fundamentally unethical, and it remains illegal throughout most of the world, with only certain countries and states legalizing it for therapeutic means. Cloning animals is more accepted, but is so expensive that it isn’t widely done anywhere. The ethics of it are also still debated among scientists, philosophers, and religious leaders. 

Zelda can’t create echoes of humans or ally species like Gerudos and Gorons, but she can instantaneously clone any creature she’s defeated throughout the game. That includes animals that are almost identical to ones you’d find in our world, like bats, snakes, and frogs. It also includes more developed monsters like Moblins and Lizalfos, who are intelligent creatures with their own settlements and culture. Zelda tosses these clones out like pebbles, making them appear and disappear as she needs, regularly sending them to their deaths with no repercussions. She treats them as mere tools, with no concern for whatever humanity-like consciousness they possess.  

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.