It’s been 39 years since The Legend of Zelda made its debut on the NES, and in all that time we’ve yet to have a game that actually features Zelda as the main protagonist…until now.
The opening scenes of Echoes of Wisdom play out in a straightforward way. Link makes his way through a dungeon, finds Zelda trapped in a crystal, and confronts Ganon to rescue her. After defeating Ganon, though, things get turned on their head. Link gets sucked into a mysterious rift, with only enough time to fire an arrow to break Zelda free of her crystal cage. With the Hero missing, it’s now up to Zelda to solve the mystery of the rifts opening up around the kingdom. Zelda’s journey takes some unexpected twists and gets darker than expected in some places, and there are some interesting lore implications and theories that can arise if you’re paying attention.
But while it would be easy enough to swap Link’s model with Zelda’s and call it a day, Nintendo rightfully decided to give Zelda her own distinct playstyle and an entire game designed around it. And it makes sense – she’s the embodiment of wisdom, so she’s going to use her brain and magical abilities to vanquish her foes rather than charging in waving a sword around.
Enter the titular echoes. Early in her adventure, Zelda obtains the Tri Rod, which allows her to learn echoes of various objects and enemies. Once she’s learned an echo, she can summon it at any time to navigate the overworld, solve a puzzle, or fight off a group of enemies. There are a ton of echoes – 127, in fact – and while some of them are samey (did we really need multiple identical statue reskins?) or upgraded versions of echoes you already have, there’s still quite a lot of variety in both function and form.
When the system works best, echoes allow you to approach puzzles and combat in myriad creative and strategic ways, like using a nimble Lizalfos to defeat some lumbering Moblins, or using a wind cannon to blow enemies into a chasm. But even with so many echoes available to you, you’ll often find yourself reverting to using a handful of immensely useful or powerful ones that greatly overshadow the others. It’s easy to rely on just staggering beds on top of each other to get across gaps, or stacking a bunch of water cubes to swim up cliffs, or just brute-forcing combat with your strongest echoes.
Speaking of combat, as you’ve probably gathered, Zelda is fairly defenseless outside her capability to summon echoes. She can maneuver around the battlefield and toss rocks and various objects at enemies, but generally your echoes will be doing all the dirty work. Controlling them can be finicky as well, as the targeting lock-on doesn’t always do what you want it to. Overall, while playing as a summoner is a cool new twist on a Zelda game, it does sometimes make combat feel like a bit of a passive, unengaging affair, and I often wished I could take a bit more of an active role when fighting enemies. Maybe the developers had given Zelda some magic spells to use in combat so she could be a bit less of a defenseless bystander.
That being said, early in her adventure, Zelda gains the ability to enter Swordfighter Form. This form allows her to temporarily channel Link’s power and equipment to get up close and personal and take an active role in combat. Again, it’s only temporary, being bound by an upgradeable meter that refills with pickups or smoothies (more on those later). I generally found myself saving Swordfighter Form to deal big damage against bosses and tough enemies, rather than making liberal use of it.
Another power granted to Zelda by the Tri Rod is Bind, which allows her to grab objects and manipulate them from a distance, clearly inspired by the Ultrahand ability from Tears of the Kingdom. Zelda can Bind and move objects in the world as well as her own echoes, hold or re-time moving platforms, and even drop enemies off cliffs. It makes for some clever puzzle design as well as allowing even more options to approach traversal and combat.
If there’s one complaint that’s been consistently leveled against recent Zelda games, it’s the abysmal UI, and Echoes of Wisdom is perhaps the biggest offender. Selecting echoes is an absolute chore – a single popup horizontal menu where you have to scroll through every single echo you’ve obtained in order to find the one you want to use. There’s no way to set some of your most-used echoes to shortcuts, and while you can sort their order in various ways including by most used, it’s still needlessly clunky and tedious.
The overworld in Echoes is an expanded and slightly rearranged take on A Link to the Past‘s Hyrule. As you traverse the world, you’ll meet the requisite Zora (both River and Sea), Gorons, Deku Scrubs, Gerudo, and other inhabitants of Hyrule that you’ve come to expect from the series. It’s a fairly standard map that plays it safe, but it’s also huge for a 2D Zelda, full of nooks and crannies to explore, and populated by numerous colorful and charming characters. And the enemy variety puts recent Zelda games to shame.
While the game is clearly inspired by the “open-air” design first showcased in Breath of the Wild, it incorporates a healthy amount of the old Ocarina formula, including a return to traditional dungeons. Zelda’s progress through her quest isn’t totally open and freeform, but it’s also not a linear path. You’ll unlock a set of dungeons which you can complete in any order, and once you complete that section you’ll proceed to another set which can be completed in any order. You can also go pretty much anywhere you want once you gain access to Hyrule Field, but there are certain areas which are soft-gated by needing certain echoes to get (which you can usually find by proceeding with the story). This structure strikes a balance between the old and new, and gives the sense of a huge explorable world while also allowing for a focused story and difficulty curve progression.
The all-but-removal of dungeons was one of my biggest complaints about the series’ direction in recent years, so Echoes feels like a welcome return to form. Even though the game’s dungeons are a bit more generic and unmemorable in comparison to others in the series, they’re still lengthy labyrinths full of devious puzzles and enemies. The bosses at the end of each dungeon are a return to form as well, being fantastically designed and making good use of the echoes you find in the area. And, taking a page out of Skyward Sword‘s book, getting to the dungeons is a challenge in itself, each with a veritable gauntlet of puzzles and quests to be completed before you actually gain access to the dungeon.
Those gauntlets culminate in a trek through one of the aforementioned rifts, into the Still World. In the Still World, Zelda must navigate a fragmented, pinkish-purple version of the landscape, using her echoes to cross gaps, defeat stronger dark versions of enemies, and scale topsy-turvy versions of the local region. It’s almost reminiscent of Pokémon Platinum‘s Distortion World, but much more fleshed-out. In addition to the Still World sections leading to the dungeons, there are numerous optional rifts located around the map that provide upgrades to the Tri Rod’s power.
In fact, there are a lot of optional things to do and gameplay systems in Echoes of Wisdom. Among the highlights are Hyrule’s many caves and even some optional mini-dungeons. The game also features dozens of side quests, many of which introduce Zelda to colorful, charming characters and encourage her to explore the overworld. There are plenty of filler side quests as well, but none of them are particularly long and, of course, entirely optional.
Echoes struggles, however, in that it introduces too many arbitrary gameplay systems – likely in service to the “open air” approach to Zelda. For example, Zelda can gain access to a horse, because what would an open world Zelda be without a horse? I think I used this horse maybe once in the entire game after that. The horse controls are clumsy and unwieldy, and with an extensive fast travel system and so many various nooks to go off the beaten path and explore, I never saw a need to gallop my way across Hyrule.
This extends to some other gameplay features as well. Zelda eventually meets a familiar face who specializes in creating Automatons, which provide an alternative to echoes in combat. But they require a long windup time and parts to repair, and it’s much more efficient to just use your echoes. Smoothies as well, which Zelda can obtain from Deku Scrub vendors around Hyrule after bringing ingredients, are a mixed bag. Some of them have very useful effects, granting elemental resistances or recharging your Swordfighter Form energy, but there are dozens upon dozens of recipes (many of which are variations of the same effect) and only a handful are actually useful. It also results in the sometimes anticlimactic experience of navigating your way to a hidden chest only to find your reward is a bunch of grapes or a bottle of milk.
Graphically, Echoes uses the same engine as the Link’s Awakening remake, with its charming, toylike 2.5D aesthetic. It’s vibrant and colorful, and it suits the game perfectly. Unfortunately, the same performance issues from that remake are retained in Echoes, with the framerate chugging a bit in several spots. For me, it never got in the way of gameplay, but the drops are noticeable at times, and someone who is especially sensitive would probably take major issue with the game’s performance.
I already wrote at length about how much I appreciated that Echoes of Wisdom brought back a lot of the Ocarina-style elements that I had sorely missed from Breath of the Wild and its successor, while also infusing the game with a healthy amount of the new “open-air” style of Zelda. Even though it doesn’t always come together as well as I’d like, it’s an admirable attempt to inject something new into the series while incorporating a lot of the classic Zelda experience that was missing from the last two Switch entries.
Echoes of Wisdom likely won’t be remembered among the greatest Zelda titles, but it’s an exceptionally charming first outing for our beloved princess as the main character, and there’s a lot here that could be built upon in future entries in the series.
