Game review 01 October 2024, 04:30

author: Giancarlo Saldana

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Review: Resounding Success

In her first main series starring role, Princess Zelda has a lot to live up to, but Echoes of Wisdom is the kind of Zelda game you’d expect in style, substance, and quality.

The review is based on the Switch version.

Mixing both traditional and modern influences, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom offers you the most freedom of any top-down Zelda game by far. Part of it is thanks to its clever mechanics of summoning monsters and objects to solve puzzles, but you can also feel some inspiration from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in how it lets you chart your own adventure.

Echoes of Wisdom may not give you full keys to the kingdom, so to speak, to do what you want, but it defies expectations in all the best ways possible. It’s more controlled in its approach to letting you figure things out on your own, but it constantly provides you with those classic motifs, themes, and melodies that most definitely make it a Zelda experience you don’t want to miss.

The Adventure of Zelda

True to its name for a change, Echoes tells Zelda’s story as she is now the protagonist of her first main series game and plays an active role in saving Hyrule. As expected, the story unfolds as you play, and while there aren’t any clever twists or turns this time around, it does manage to keep your attention as you search for answers to many questions the game throws at you from the start. You’ll soon find out more about the strange dimensional rifts that have started popping up all over Hyrule as well as the origins of the yellow Lemonhead-like beings whose job is to repair them.

Before you dismiss this title as a spin-off to the main series simply because Link isn’t the star, rest assured Echoes feels very much like any other main “Legend” due to how it plays out and the important story it tells. Without spoiling anything, the game provides a new addition to the series and includes its own main villain while still tying in themes from past games that have given each one that distinct familiar feel. The only difference here is that instead of using your sword and other weapons, you use Zelda’s newfound abilities to traverse your world.

During your adventure, you befriend one of these beings named Tri who gives you a special rod that lets you save copies of various enemies and objects you encounter and then paste them onto your world to use as you wish. This allows you to explore your surroundings in more ways than before as you can create beds to hop on to reach a heart piece on an out-of-reach pillar or call on a spider and follow its movements with another ability you quickly learn to climb over trees and explore the map as much as you want.

These abilities truly give you the chance to go wherever you want right from the start. You may not see the story in motion all the time as some cutscenes are locked until you reach a certain part of the game, but you can spend hours simply exploring much of the world, collecting hidden treasure chests, and defeating enemies to gain new echoes until you decide to go back to the main story. In fact, even here you have a choice as to which two main quests you want to tackle first and which last three you decide to complete. You may not have the scope of exploration as you see in a fully open-world game, but Echoes just wants you to explore it and discover all its secrets at your own pace.

Fighting Outside the Box

Because you are not playing as Link, combat is different what you would expect and instead you need to rely on these echoes to do your bidding. Each echo has a certain power requirement, and as you progress through the game you will be able to call on stronger ones that require more or simply call out multiple echoes to overwhelm your enemies. I spent the earlier portion of the game simply exploring and discovering echoes in areas I probably shouldn’t have been to yet, but this also let me find strong echoes I couldn’t use until later in the game when I had more power. In the meantime, I had to rely on what I had at my disposal to clear out enemies in dungeons and those guarding treasure chests throughout the map.

To be honest, you actually can “play as Link” to an extent as you can call on his powers for a few seconds when you need to. This ability is great during certain boss enemies when all you want to do is hack away at their weak spot instead of waiting for one of your echoes to attack. Boss battles even encourage you to use your sword during these moments and provide you with collectibles to refill your “Link” gauge. This ability doesn’t overshadow the importance of using echoes, however, as you will still need to use them to fight, but calling on his powers does speed things up to prevent the game from feeling too passive during more pivotal moments.

Certain echoes are meant for exploration while others are combat-oriented, but you can also use these non-combat ones to give you an advantage during fights like blocking off enemies with a boulder or using a wind cannon to push them away.Using the bind ability, you can also telepathically grab enemies and move them where you want them to go sometimes leading them to traps or simply pushing them off cliffs or into water where they will meet their doom. How you approach combat is entirely up to you so expect the same amount of fighting as you would in any Zelda game with the only difference being the need to think outside the box.

A Kingdom to Explore

This same concept of combat can be applied to the various dungeons you explore which have their fair share of enemies to defeat but also are filled with puzzles that can be solved in multiple ways. Sometimes you need to hit a switch to open a door, but how you hit that switch truly depends on the echoes you have at your disposal and even your creativity. Sure, you could just try to make your way to that switch, but why not use a flying echo to hit it from afar? There were probably dozens of puzzles I solved thinking I had the best and fastest solution, but chances are someone out there thought theirs was better. This format makes the game feel special and lets players personalize it with their own style of puzzle-solving.

These main dungeons are also a joy to discover and even more fun to complete as they continue the various elemental themes from previous games but provide you with fresh new concepts in solving them. You don’t gain weapons or special items in each ones like in past games, but that’s because you don’t need them considering your echoes are those special items. Instead, each one provides you with new enemies you can add to your arsenal and use their skills wisely. Navigating through them is straightforward and though I never got stuck during exploration, I wish the game’s floor map would be a little less confusing to read as you can get lost trying to track which set of stairs takes you to which area.

Beyond the main quests, Echoes also provides you with plenty of side quests that let you find unique echoes as well as those that reward you with rupees to spend on various accessories that give you permanent boosts each time you equip them. Smoothies that grant you health and temporary stat boosts are also available, but I didn’t find them particularly helpful besides just recovering health during harder boss fights. You can practically summon a bed echo whenever you want to recover your health so unless you want to decide to tackle on the game’s challenging Hero mode, staying alive shouldn’t be too difficult.

There is one is issue, however, with amassing a large number of echoes and that is selecting the right one quickly from an ever-growing list. To call an echo, you open up a menu and scroll through them, but you can only sort them in a couple of ways such as most used, last used, etc. There is no way to favorite echoes or map them on other buttons making this process of summoning them a bit clunky. There’s not much you can do when you have a set number of buttons on a controller, either, but it’s a necessary evil worth mentioning.

Final Thoughts

Aesthetically, the game has that distinct figurine-look from the remake of Links’ Awakening meaning everything looks colorful and cutesy. It’s not jarringly cute as the game does take itself seriously and even features some touching emotional moments, but these visuals surprisingly put a damper on the Switch’s performance as you will encounter frame rate issues from time to time. This won’t hurt your experience too much but they are noticeable mainly while traversing the world.

These small issues aside, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is simply delightful and is how every top-down Zelda game should feel like. It manages to mix old elements with new ones that make it feel like a Zelda game without being too repetitive or too foreign. Even its soundtrack features music that is entirely original, but you can make out classic riffs and melodies in some of them that instantly fills you with nostalgia.

Nintendo has seen what has worked in past games and has added to that new mechanics that give players more freedom to explore it at their own pace without overwhelming you with things to do. Echoes of Wisdom balances out these elements in a way that makes for an adventure you can’t put down and puts Zelda in the spotlight for all the good reasons. It’s not huge in the scale of Tears of the Kingdom in size or depth, but it still manages to give you plenty of hours of fun, exploration, and wonder that make it an influential entry in the Legend of Zelda series.