After nearly four decades of Zelda games across a ton of different platforms and perspectives, it’s truly hard to predict where Nintendo will take this beloved series. They’ve done open world and end of the world. They’ve had touch controls and motion controls. They’ve been single player and multiplayer. The latest installment, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, is already shaping up to feel like a classic Zelda adventure, and in classic Nintendo form, also features some really cool and unique twists. It’s also the first Zelda game where Zelda is fully playable through the entire story and with that she’s brought a whole new way to experience it.
By learning “echoes” Zelda is able to quickly build up a collection of objects, creatures, and more that she can use to traverse the world, solve puzzles, and defeat enemies. After some routine world shattering chaos which Zelda is unfortunately blamed for, Echoes of Wisdom opens with a post-jailbreak stealth sequence that plays a bit like the part in Ocarina of Time where Link first sneaks into Hyrule Castle. However, while you might be able to have Zelda brute force this section by just running and hiding, I realized it was immediately much more fun to make the castle guards think they accidentally captured an insane demonic witch who could summon furniture at a whim and torment them with magically materialized objects falling from the sky. Now, I didn’t need to play like this, but hey, it was much funnier that way. A guard tried chasing me down and, in a moment of panic, I summoned a wooden table behind me to block and distract him and probably make him think he was losing his mind or that the place was haunted. I then proceeded to learn more echoes for my permanent collection: a wooden crate, the traditional ceramic pot that Link has destroyed tens of millions of, and more. It immediately made me wonder just how many of these things would become part of Zelda’s repertoire and if I’d be in possession of an entire IKEA catalog by the end of the game.
And that’s where Nintendo’s vision for the next era of top down 2D Zelda games really clicked for me. It’s been eleven years since the excellent The Legend of Zelda: Link Between Worlds was released for the 3DS, a game that notoriously took the rather formulaic and predictable flow of traditional 2D Zelda games and made it much more freeform, allowing players to collect items and defeat dungeons in pretty much any order of their choosing. Since then Nintendo has also completely reinvented the 3D Zelda series. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom not only gave players a massive open world sandbox to explore at their own pace, they also gave us a seemingly infinite toolset to tackle them. Tears of the Kingdom especially relied on these mechanics, nudging players to build elaborate (or janky) vehicles and contraptions to make their way across the lands and skies of Hyrule. And between Breath of the Wild and Tears, Nintendo gave us The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, a gorgeously reimagined take on their excellent and uniquely weird 1993 Game Boy game, now with a toyetic and claymation inspired art style. It was about as traditional as 2D Zelda can get and I adored it, but it was also a remake of a game I’d played countless times before, so it didn’t exactly give us a clear vision of where the future of top down Zelda games was heading.
The obvious answer at the time was to remake the Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons games in the same art style since they originally looked and played like Link’s Awakening did on Game Boy. But one of the best parts of being a Nintendo fan is never really knowing what to expect next. Just you when you think they’ll do the most obvious thing, they hit you with a surprise out of nowhere. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom takes everything they’ve learned from decades of 2D Zelda games, throws in some of the freeform creativity and problem solving from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and puts it all together in the beautiful Link’s Awakening remake art style. It’s also solving one of the biggest gripes players have with modern 3D Zelda games by bringing back the traditional dungeons, a key ingredient of this cherished recipe that’s been sorely missing recently. It’s taking all of the best things that the 2D and 3D Zelda games have done and fusing them together to create the future of the series, and so far it’s really working for me. Seemingly every screen in Echoes of Wisdom provided me with an opportunity to approach it in a unique way while still feeling like I was playing an old-school top-down Zelda game. Initially, my impulse was to just slash everything with a sword like I’ve made Link do for most of my life, and I was admittedly a bit frustrated that I couldn’t. It takes a bit to get used to Zelda’s abilities here, but once you find your groove, things start to get really fun and interesting. You could throw rocks at enemies to kill them like some sort of brute savage, but wouldn’t it be funnier to swarm them to death with bats, summon moblins to target them with spears, or my personal favorite: bowling ball them to death with a small army of adorable but dangerous Caramadillos? God, I love these weird little guys.
Zelda does eventually get a sword in Echoes of Wisdom – sort of – by defeating an evil imposter version of Link, taking control of his iconic weapon set, and learning swordfighter form. This form also lets you jump higher and perform spin attacks, but it’s not without its caveats. Zelda’s sword power is on a limited energy budget and once it’s been depleted, she’ll need to replenish it to use it again. It seems like you’ll be able to expand your sword’s energy reserves as you progress through the game, but at the start it can only be used for a brief time before it runs out – at least until you find some more energy again. Nintendo seems keen on making sure Zelda plays differently than Link usually does in these games, and you’ll likely be utilizing her Tri-Rod and its bottomless bag of summonable objects much more often, with her sword being used sparingly and for key moments and conflicts. After all, if you’ve got an ax-wielding Darknut warrior in your back pocket you’re less likely to miss your trusty blade in the moment.
Those Darknuts were particularly effective at defeating evil Link, almost to the point where I felt bad doing it. That’s Link! I love that dude! Cornering him with one psychotically possessed Darknut echo, looping around behind him, and spawning another one to catch him off guard proved to be a quick way to confuse and surprise him and deal a bunch of damage, but again, that was by no means the only way to take him down. I probably could’ve bludgeoned him to death with furniture or some other comically horrific way to kill one of my favorite guys. Do whatever you feel you need to do. There’s a limit to what you can summon with your Tri-Rod, with some things costing one point (meaning you can summon several of them) and others using several. I’m hoping you’ll be able to expand your Tri-Rod’s power later in the game, because summoning a small entourage of enemies to roll with you at any time would be really awesome. Or covering half of a screen with pots just because you can.
One of the highlights of my preview demo was passing the controller back and forth with my fellow IGN Nintendo nerd, Zelda obsessive, and good buddy Logan Plant and seeing how he’d get through puzzles and battles in his own way. We each had unique solutions for problems, and personal favorite things we’d summon and watching somebody else think frantically and react on the fly was so much fun. Things like spiders (complete with climbable webs) and fire items added a chaotic and hilariously unexpected layer to each scenario. A thing you summon won’t attack you or deal you damage, but if it happens to say, light something else on fire, that fire could come back to hurt you. There’s a rules of improv thing happening here that totally works in its favor and created several laugh-out-loud scenarios that rewarded our creativity or stupidity. There was rarely a truly wrong way to solve something here in the same way you could technically cut a loaf of bread with a spoon, but there’s probably a smarter way to make a sandwich.
The Suthorn Ruins dungeon was the perfect proving ground to test all of these toys out. It’s a traditional Zelda dungeon through and through and it looks and feels fantastic. It was truly exciting to finally be back in one of these again. But instead of relying on one newly discovered item or weapon to beat it like you would in an older Zelda dungeon, you’re learning how to summon new things every other minute. You’ve got an entire arsenal to play with, and each room feels rife for experimentation and playfulness. Some puzzles had a clear and obvious answer while others demanded some creativity, and seeing how different people solved them in different ways was a total joy. The speedrunning and sequence-breaking communities out there are gonna have a blast with this game.
This ever-growing library of tools and toys work wonderfully in the overworld, too, which seems absolutely massive by 2D Zelda standards. I am so excited to uncover every single secret on this map. Using your echoes you’ll be able to climb over walls and trees and other obstacles that used to keep you locked to specific paths and routes in the older Zelda games. I’m interested to see how they’ll manage to keep players from rushing to the final dungeon or boss, since as of now it seems like you can climb up and over nearly everything, whether you’re using a spider web or a crude staircase you made out of dirty old beds, which, by the way, will slowly heal Zelda if she sleeps in them long enough, creating a very funny scenario where she takes a nap in the middle of a fight with an enemy if that’s what you feel like doing. I’ve got a lot of questions around how these options will play out in the full game. The final boss battles in most Zelda games are epic and awesome and also generally require a specific sword stab or light arrow for the final blow. Will you be able to kill Ganon by dropping a coffee table on his head in Echoes of Wisdom? Well, who knows, but I’m excited to see players try these kinds of things out. One apprehension I do have is just how you’ll organize your gigantic collection of Echoes as the game progresses. There are a few decent options for selecting items to summon at a whim (like “most used”) but no favorites list as far as I can tell, meaning you’ll often find yourself scrolling through a ton of different objects, creatures, and other assorted nonsense that you might need at any given moment. It’s not necessarily tedious and the gameplay pauses to allow you to find what you need at the moment, but I could see it being a bit cumbersome once you’ve unlocked a few dozen different things in your library. And with nearly every enemy and object in the world seemingly being scannable, you’ll likely have a ton to sort through by the end of the game.
Echoes of Wisdom is generally incredibly pretty to look at, which is no surprise since it’s using the very charming Link’s Awakening remake art style. The world is teeming with life, quirky characters, and animations, and the town I visited was lovely and I couldn’t wait to meet everyone and snoop around their houses. That said, the Link’s Awakening remake was notoriously taxing on the Nintendo Switch hardware with noticeable framerate dips frequently appearing in the overworld, and while Echoes of Wisdom feels much smoother on that front, there are still moments where it hiccups a bit. It’s not a dealbreaker or anything but it’s worth pointing out. Hey Nintendo, whenever you’re ready to release that Nintendo Switch successor you keep hinting at, we’ll take it.
All in all, Echoes of Wisdom feels like an earnest and clever return to the Zelda games I grew up playing. Challenging, inventive, fresh, and genuinely just really fun. Every new puzzle and conflict is a blank canvas for experimentation, but it’s all wrapped in that distinctively familiar and challenging Zelda game vibe that made me fall in love with these games to begin with. It’s vintage Zelda mixed with the playful and creativity based gameplay that younger audiences are used to building their own stories with these days. It’s not pushing that side of things as far as games like Minecraft, Roblox, or even Tears of the Kingdom does, but it’s also not rigid and specific with the way it makes you approach it. Attempting to juggle several of the core tenets of what makes the Zelda games so special to so many people across so many generations and make them all happy is an extremely tall order. The longer any franchise thrives, the more difficult it becomes to please everyone that approaches it with specific expectations. Every fan has a different reason why Zelda is special to them. But so far, Echoes of Wisdom feels like it’s taking the best elements of the most beloved modern and vintage Zelda games and making them work together in a pretty clever synchronicity. Whether they’ll get along for the whole trip remains to be seen, but right now it feels like a smart move and a truly exciting way to push the classic side of the franchise towards the future.
