After playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom for about 90 minutes, my main takeaway is that Princess Zelda finally being the protagonist of a Zelda game is maybe the fourth or fifth most interesting thing about it.
That’s not to say Zelda taking center stage after a few decades of being a damsel in distress isn’t significant or awesome — because it is both of those things. But Nintendo’s latest mainline Zelda entry (surprisingly launching only a year and a half after Tears of the Kingdom) is experimental in more ways than just giving players a new pair of shoes to step into.
With what seems like a refreshing mix of classic Zelda design and modern Zelda mechanics, Echoes of Wisdom might have a little bit of something for every type of Zelda fan.
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Tri to keep up
Credit: Nintendo
As announced in the June Nintendo Direct, Echoes of Wisdom is a new 2D Zelda game that uses the same tech and art style as the 2019 Link’s Awakening remake. My demo involved most of the game’s opening bits, up to and including the first dungeon. While I didn’t get to see the entire opening of the story, it seems appropriately Zelda-y.
Basically, some evil purple magic stuff has started taking over parts of Hyrule and stealing citizens away to another realm called Still World. Link, the brave swordsman who has starred in every Zelda game up to this point, is nowhere to be found, so Zelda herself has to save her kingdom.
She’ll do so with the help of Tri, a fairy who joins the franchise’s legendary pantheon of magical blobs that help the player throughout their journey.
Tri’s got more tricks up their sleeves than just shouting “Hey! Listen!” over and over, though. Tri turns into the “Tri Rod,” a magical staff that can store “echoes” of inanimate objects and live enemies Zelda has encountered, which Zelda can then, in turn, summon back into the world whenever she pleases.
You got your 3D Zelda in my 2D Zelda
Credit: Nintendo
All of that has been known since Nintendo first showed the game over the summer, so my time with the demo was spent mostly looking for the things we didn’t know.
After sleeping on it, I think Echoes of Wisdom is a hybrid between what Zelda used to be and what Zelda is now. In other words, it seems to be taking the more structured, puzzle-based overworld and dungeon design from old Zelda games and giving players a mechanical toolset more akin to the last two comparatively freeform entries: Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild.
Perhaps the game opens up after a while (in fact, I’m almost certain it does), but what I played was not anywhere near as free-roaming as those two games. Like a classic 2D Zelda, the map is made up of small screens that each feel like a small puzzle room to solve on the way to your destination.
There may be enemies to kill or a treasure chest to find, or maybe just a cliff you need to figure out a way to climb. But the point is that this isn’t a game about traversing wide open expanses.
The twist, of course, lies in the echo system. A traditional Zelda game would hand you an item in the middle of a dungeon and structure the rest of the dungeon around that item. But here, Zelda is capable of conjuring tables, beds, trampolines, and even live enemies whenever she wants.
There’s a hard limit of four or five summons you can have on-screen at once, but there’s no cooldown on the act of summoning an echo itself. If you want to spam tables, you can spam tables.
This means there’s a lot of latitude in how you solve any given puzzle, but not too much, from what I played. For instance, when I wanted to climb from one level to another, and a ladder wasn’t available, things like tables and trampolines are always useful. There might be some kind of fun, tricky way to achieve the same goal by summoning enemy snakes, but puzzles feel like they’re designed around a specific subset of your available echoes and not necessarily all of them at once.
Credit: Nintendo
I played the game’s first dungeon and pretty much immediately noted that it felt more like a regular Zelda dungeon than anything in Breath or Tears. Small, self-contained rooms contained bespoke, clever little puzzles that were often easy to solve using echoes that were conveniently placed in or near the room. It harkened back to old Zelda for me when I saw a fire-based echo and then the next few rooms revolved around using fire to solve puzzles.
Of course, combat is a thing here, and that’s where enemy echoes come in. You can conjure enemies you’ve defeated before and they’ll work on your behalf. A new lock-on targeting system (seriously, they put Z-targeting in a 2D Zelda!) makes it easy to command your echoes to attack specific enemies, and each one is useful in different scenarios.
Zelda also gets a magical “Swordfighter Form,” with which she can basically just play like Link and use a sword for a while. It’s meter-based and seemed pretty limited from what I could tell, so you can’t just live in Swordfighter Form. You’ll have to learn how to fight with echoes, too.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: Final thoughts
Overall, I came away more impressed with Echoes of Wisdom than I anticipated. Creatively solving puzzles using echoes came to me pretty quickly despite it being unlike any other Zelda game.
As much as I love the last two gargantuan open-world adventures, the idea of a smaller, more traditional (but still very weird and unique) mainline Zelda right now sounds downright lovely.
I just can’t wait to see how wild the puzzle design gets in the second half of the game.
