Nintendo hates discounting its first-party games when they are five years old, let alone five days old. Woot is selling the just-released The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom for $52, which certainly breaks from tradition. This is a discount of $8 or 13 percent. It’s unlikely you’ll find anything lower until the game starts showing up in used bins.
This is a physical copy of the new Zelda game that we called “both familiar and fresh” in our official review. It’s familiar because this is a top-down adventure that calls to mind The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, among others. It’s fresh because of, well, everything else.
This is the first game in the franchise that lets you control the titular princess (no I’m not counting the ancient Philips CD-i title.) This isn’t just a skin swap. Zelda is a completely different hero, with a unique moveset that changes just about every aspect of gameplay. Where Link is a standard sword-wielding warrior, Zelda is a mage/summoner.
She can summon (literally) hundreds of items, including nearly every monster in the game. This means you can roll into battle flanked by an army of bloodthirsty Moblins, though lately I’ve been going with crows. These monsters typically have a secondary use for puzzle solving and traversal, which is an absolute blast.
There’s also a whole lot of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in this game’s DNA. It looks like an old-school Zelda game, but kind of plays like a new one. There are traditional dungeons, which is great, but there’s no pressure to complete them. I’ve only done one and I’ve put in like 15 hours so far. Instead, I’m using wild and wacky mechanics to explore every nook and cranny of the (surprisingly) huge map, on the hunt for secrets and new summons.
There’s only one downside that most reviews have touched on. There are a lot of summons in this game, which are called echoes. Picking and choosing from over a hundred monsters and objects can require some cumbersome menu navigation. As for this sale, Woot is only allowing one copy per customer, with a shipment date of October 11.
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