The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Review – The Courage to Defy Power

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is an incredibly interesting game. Continuing on from the Zelda Team’s stated goal of diverging from the standards and tropes that have defined the long-running franchise for so long, it seeks to be a new spin on the 2D Zelda template, not dissimilar to how Breath of the Wild broke the formula that the 3D games had been finding themselves increasingly confined by until then. 

That alone merits it a lot of attention, of course, but there’s a lot more here that makes it notable – the big thing is that this is the first mainline Legend of Zelda game that lets you actually play as the eponymous Princess (until now, her playable excursions have either been limited to spin-offs such as the Hyrule Warriors games, or to appearances in titles such as the Super Smash Bros. series). It is also the first new single player 2D Zelda game in over eleven years, following on from 2013’s excellent, incredible A Link Between Worlds.

"Rather than simply being a model swap for Link, Zelda plays entirely differently."

So, for a lot of reasons, there’s a lot of scrutiny this game is under. How does it turn out, given all of that, and does it live up to the wait people have had for any one of those things mentioned above? The answer is largely yes. Echoes of Wisdom does have a few quibbles that, but it’s a smartly and intelligently well-designed game that effectively sets a foundation for 2D Zelda titles to imbibe a lot of the same principles of player agency, creativity, and emergent gameplay, that have made Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom among the most acclaimed games of all time.

It all comes back to playing as Princess Zelda. Rather than simply being a model swap for Link, Zelda plays entirely differently. She doesn’t fight with a sword – actually she engages in little to no direct combat. Instead, she has the ability to duplicate almost any object, and then to use it for whatever she needs. This is a remarkably expansive ability, and includes enemies, furniture, fixtures in the environment, and all sorts of things that you can duplicate and summon. Whether it’s a navigational challenge, a dungeon puzzle, or a combat encounter, you get the chance of summoning all sorts of things and have them help you and/or do your dirty work for you.

"Echoes of Wisdom does have a few quibbles that, but it’s a smartly and intelligently well-designed game that effectively sets a foundation for 2D Zelda titles to imbibe a lot of the same principles of player agency, creativity, and emergent gameplay, that have made Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom among the most acclaimed games of all time."

This leads to a very different style of gameplay. It is no longer as active or immediate as past 2D Zelda games have especially been. A lot of the game is now taking stock of where you are, what that place is like, figuring out a plan, and then executing it. Depending on the player’s plan, things can end up going incredibly straightforward and as expected, or they can go sideways and they can find themselves having to improvise. You can summon tough enemies you have beaten already to fight for you on your side, you can summon objects and items to move and throw around, and you can sit back and watch as the dominoes fall down around you while you sip on a smoothy and relax.

This ability is not the only thing Zelda gets in her arsenal, however. She also gets the ability to bind herself to… well, almost anything in the environment. Once she does, she has the option to either effortlessly move that object wherever and however she desires, or to instead follow their movement. These are both extremely clever abilities that are used for some very satisfying abilities and puzzles in the game. They can also be used in combat to great effect (or great hilarity), and when combined with the echoes ability, gives Zelda an incredibly versatile move set that does differentiate her from Link.

You remember how I mentioned earlier that Zelda doesn’t fight with a sword? That is, depending on your interpretation, accurate or inaccurate. You see, earlier on in the game, she manages to recover Link’s sword, and when she does, she has the ability to channel Link’s spirit of heroism and courage, transforming into him and being able to wield the sword for a limited amount of time to slash it about and more directly engage in combat.

This ability is time limited and has to be recharged with a specific resource that is dropped by enemies and in the environment. But it does mark an immediate contrast with how the rest of the game plays, allowing more a more immediate and involved style of play, which can feel… interesting. Often times, the sword is simply the quickest way to dispatch of enemies around you, making it tempting to ignore all the echoes and binding and just slash enemies away and moving on. It serves to highlight the weakness of the game’s combat in general – Zelda’s ability  to directly fight back being so limited means combat is inarguably the weakest part of the game, even at its best. Being able to dispatch enemies more quickly can highlight and exacerbate that frustration sometimes.

"Combat is inarguably the weakest part of the game, even at its best."

Truthfully, it doesn’t happen all too often. The bulk of the game is designed around Zelda’s non-sword moves, and for most combat encounters, it ends up being a lot of fun calling upon and abusing echoes to spam away at the enemy and destroy them before they even have a chance. And for what it matters, the bulk of the game isn’t expecting you to engage in direct combat either, with its enemy encounters treated more as puzzles for you to solve than being something that requires an instant response like combat traditionally does.

Enemy encounters themselves are not the point a lot of the times. Instead, you will be exploring the world, figuring out how to traverse the environment, solving puzzles, and making discoveries. Echoes of Wisdom is, like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, designed as an open world. Even as a top-down 2D Zelda game. This translates to you not getting a prescribed sequence in which to do things, and with the world being designed as a contiguous one where you get the ability to go where you want, when you want – although, unlike in Breath and Tears, there are story- and progress-related barriers you can run into a lot of the time.

The world design is truly a joy, and probably the area this game shines the most at. The map is gigantic, bigger than any 2D Zelda map so far (though with it being a top-down title, it never feels sprawling and unwieldy the way Tears of the Kingdom can). It maintains the density of the 2D Zelda maps, with almost screen on the map having something for the player to encounter or discover. There are caves with secrets and loot hidden throughout, enemy camps to find, a surprising number of settlements and NPcs, a lot of quests to find, and there are even optional dungeons (or mini dungeons at least).

The reward for exploration can often be simply the act of happening upon something new, or managing to find your way to a spot that seemed out of reach, before you managed to finagle your way to it – but the game also tries to give players tangible in-game rewards for trying to go off the beaten path, from a non-stop flow of rupees, to consumables that can be used as-is or crafted to make smoothies that restore health and grant all sorts of other buffs and debuffs. You can find NPcs that give you new quests, you can find pieces of heart (yes, these are back!), or you could even happen upon an unusual and useful echo. There’s always something. 

In a lot of ways, the dense design of the world with lots of tangible rewards to happen upon is almost like a response to the criticisms a small number of players have had for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom – both games that emphasize sparseness and empty space in terms of density, and both games that have been criticized for lacking in meaningful in-game rewards for players. Echoes of Wisdom does have some sparseness to its world – given how much bigger it is than past 2D Zelda titles, it would be impossible not to – but as I mentioned previously, it is largely dense and full of things to find, see, and do. It is a joy to simply traverse and explore the world.

"The dungeon design is a lot more authored, with a very deliberate design and pacing, than the dungeons in Breath or Tears ever managed, with Echoes’ dungeons freely falling back on linearity and limiting players’ movement through the dungeon. All of this allows Echoes’ dungeons to hit heights that the new 3D games simply do not manage."

Another area where players may find Echoes’ design sensibilities better suited for their tastes than Breath or Tears is the dungeon design. Echoes of Wisdom’s dungeon design hews a lot closer to classic 2D Zelda dungeons, than the dungeons in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom do for classic 3D Zelda dungeons. Obviously, the dungeons here are not exactly the same as past ones – they rely more on puzzle-solving and navigational challenges, and they never lock you out on the basis of one possible solution to a problem only.

However, their design is a lot more authored, with a very deliberate design and pacing, than the dungeons in Breath or Tears ever managed, with Echoes’ dungeons freely falling back on linearity and limiting players’ movement through the dungeon. All of this allows Echoes’ dungeons to hit heights that the new 3D games simply do not manage. The dungeon pacing and structure is excellent, there is a return of some of the classic lock and key design, and the variance in gameplay is maintained by allowing for every puzzle to be solvable in multiple ways by different combinations of echoes and your abilities. Indeed, of the “open” Zelda games – so starting with A Link Between Worlds, and going through Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom to Echoes of Wisdom – there is a case to be made that Echoes has the best dungeons. They are certainly better than both the 3D games, and only A Link. Between Worlds has ones that may rival Echoes’.

Then there are the dungeon bosses which, again, follow more from 2D Zelda titles than the newer 3D ones, and again, end up with more classic style boss fights with multiple phases, move sets, weak points, and strategies, for players to cycle through before they take them out and end up winning. Some of these bosses are absolutely spectacular, benefitting simultaneously from the limitations imposed upon the developers with this new style of gameplay they have adopted in this game, and the freedom that the player has on hand, which allows them to improvise their way out of tricky situations a whole lot easier (and creates for some thrilling emergent gameplay stories).

Other than the combat, if there are complaints to be levelled at Echoes of Wisdom, those are largely the ones that it inherits from other titles. For example, the performance is… subpar. There are a lot of frame rate drops and hitches, and slowdowns when the screen gets busy. This was an issue in 2019’s remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening – which used the same engine – and unfortunately, they haven’t really addressed it for this one. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that this might actually be worse. Like with that game, the problems can be somewhat addressed by installing the game to your internal system memory, but if you bought physical, you are kind of out of luck.

"While I would argue the combat’s weaknesses hold the game back from achieving the incredible highs that the last three titles have, everything else about the game is the series firing on all cylinders, taking a tried and tested, beloved format, and then tweaking it with a dash of new without getting rid of what it is players loved about the original formula to begin with."

Then there is the UI. The two open world Zelda titles, have horrible, horrible UI that is clunky and relies on making the user spend as much time in it as it can. In Breath of the Wild, the UI was bothersome, but not antithetical to the flow of the game. This largely comes down to Breath of the Wild giving its players limited tools to work with, meaning that while, yes, you were spending a lot of time scrolling through menus and overlays, it wasn’t too bad.

Then Tears of the Kingdom made it worse by giving you every possible thing to deal with any possible situation at any possible time – meaning that you were constantly scrolling through endless lists to find what you wanted or needed. Echoes of Wisdom keeps the same UI, and while some of it benefits from this being a smaller scale game than the 3D ones it takes the menus from, the issue is that Echoes of Wisdom, too, gives players a lot of tools to deal with situations. Over 100 objects and enemies in the game can be turned into echoes, which means that you could be scrolling through a list of literally over a hundred items to find what you need by the end. Sorting options provided absolutely help, but they really need to fix their UI before the next Zelda game happens. I swear, if I see another Zelda game with these hotkeyed horizontal scrolling menus for item or ability selection, I will pop a vein.

These quibbles are bothersome, but they never feel disruptive, and they never detract from what the game is achieving elsewhere. While I would argue the combat’s weaknesses hold the game back from achieving the incredible highs that the last three titles have, everything else about the game is the series firing on all cylinders, taking a tried and tested, beloved format, and then tweaking it with a dash of new without getting rid of what it is players loved about the original formula to begin with. Zelda fans old and new will find a lot to love with Echoes of Wisdom, which launched under a lot of scrutiny and expectations, but manages to live up to almost all of them. The future is bright for 2D Zelda – hopefully, though, the next one won’t take over a decade to come.

This game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch.