The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Review

Nintendo and Grezzo’s The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is my favorite Seldom Play in eighteen years. I don’t think this will be true for everyone, especially people who first started the series with BOTW Or TOTKBut for people who missed the more linear approach, and for the players who stuck with the series through decades, Echoes of wisdom Feels like fan service in the best way possible – and it does so without losing the creativity that made the latest titles so popular.

I’ll be honest here, Breath of the wild Almost clicked with me, but it never really did. Unfortunately, I’m too much of a fan of the bespoke dungeons, multi-tier fetch quests, bustling cities and item/ability progression offered by the previous mainline Legend of Zelda Entries for it to always really stick. Even Tears of the kingdomwhich I love mechanically and nostalgically, did not feel like a Seldom Play to me. Echoes of wisdom Does.

It almost feels like an experiment, and if we know what we’re doing about Nintendo as a company, it could be very good. One can almost imagine a one-sentence elevator pitch for Echoes of wisdomsomething similar to “Could the same kind of freedom we gave players in Tears of the Kingdom work in a traditional Legend of Zelda game?“The answer, thankfully, is absolutely yes.

Wherever she goes, she won’t need roads

Echoes of Wisdom lets you forge your own path forward

Freedom comes in the form of “echoes”, which Zelda creates with a magic wand given to her by Tree – who, by the way, is my favorite Legend of Zelda Companion character now. There are over a hundred echoes that Zelda can findFrom wooden crates and beds to blocks of water, clouds and almost every enemy in the game, minus the bosses. Some are good for traversal, some are used to solve puzzles, and some are just plain fun.

The more traversal-focused echoes (especially the trampoline and the platform boom, an enemy in the form of a platform that rises up high and then smashes down) make getting around Echoes of wisdom Overworld incredibly easy and entertaining. Yes, you could simply follow the path and stay between the trees, but it is much more enjoyable to jump onto the trees themselves. The fact that this map feels so similar to the world map of A link to the past Probably helps with this – the trees and canyons have been barriers for decades, and now you can just climb right over them.

“Easy and entertaining” is probably the best way to describe it Echoes of wisdom as a whole. It is far from the most difficult Seldom Ever made game, and even when the combat is at its hardest, there are plenty of ways to heal yourself in battle. There are food items that can be used to make different types of smoothies in Deku Scrub stands or eaten straight away, the classic hearts hidden inside pots and dropped from enemies, and up to four possible bottled fairies.

In the beginning, players can do little in the way of damaging enemies other than throwing things at them or using Zelda’s tri-wheel control power to move them over a lethal drop. Despite this, you will quickly accumulate a wide variety of enemy echoes to use at your own discretion, and certain combinations can absolutely wreck rooms full of enemies with ease. like Tears of the kingdom Before that, I’m excited to see what kind of combinations the community will come up with once the game is out in the wild.

What kind of Zelda fan are you?

Echoes of Wisdom balances BOTW with Twilight Princess

One of the longest-running jokes in gaming revolves around the fact that The Legend of Zelda is a pretty odd title for a series that almost always focuses on a different protagonist. When playing Echoes of wisdombut, It’s hard not to feel like that This Is Zelda’s real legend.

From a story perspective, and without spoiling anything, I have my own theories about where Echoes of wisdom Sit up The Legend of ZeldaThe timeline of this game is the actual “Legend” of Zelda. For someone like me, for someone who has played the series for over 30 years, it is beautiful.

That’s not to say it’s a perfect game. The relative ease of combat makes most of the ingredients, smoothies, and power-up accessories (like the hairpins that make hearts drop from enemies more often) relatively unnecessary, and once I got a solid rotation of echoes that interfered with my own game Style everything. Otherwise is basically ignored unless needed for a specific puzzle or combat encounter.

There are also a noticeable amount of dropped frames when traveling through areas in the overworldEspecially in Hyrule Field. As someone who usually doesn’t care about such things, even I found it to be a bit too stutter-y at times.

It is Tri’s job to help remove the rifts spread across Hyrule, and players will need to jump into the rifts to enter the “after world” to assist. Clearing Rifts is reminiscent of Link’s excursions into the Twilight Realm in Twilight PrincessWith the hall, a certain number of collectibles were distributed in the area, which must be received before the column can be closed. Although many of the rifts in the overworld are optional, even clearing the ones that are necessary for the main path can get a little tedious after a while.

The dungeons in Echoes of wisdom Are fun but never too challenging, and throughout the entire game there was only one instance where I had to think for more than a few minutes about a puzzle. There is nothing on par with some of the hardest shrine puzzles in BOTW Or TOTKAnd nothing as dirty as some of the puzzles in titles like Majora’s Mask Or Ocarina of Time. Even the more obtuse side quests can be deduced fairly quicklyWhich is a shame because they are, by and large, fairly enjoyable.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

There is nothing wrong with too many options

Like all the best Legend of Zelda games, Echoes of wisdom is packed with things that are not actually necessary to beat the game. In addition to the many echoes mentioned above, there are also Automons, robots that can be created by combining multiple types of echoes in a workshop, in case Zelda needs even more help during battles. It’s a cat suit that lets you talk to cats. You can play the whole game and never realize that there is a farm where you could have gotten a horse if you wanted, but you missed it because you were too busy hopping on trees.

After a certain point, quite early, Zelda can also wield a sword (and several other of Link’s iconic weapons) for a short time. The meter drains pretty quickly and, unless you’re in the afterworld, there are few ways to refill it consistently.

Because of this, I found myself ignoring the swordfighting form almost all the time unless it felt strictly necessary for a boss fight or specific puzzle. I’m sure others will want to use it more often, but I found the gameplay loop of dropping a Darknut in front of me and then using Tree to move it around the room and attack enemies from afar much more satisfying.

Even with this overabundance of options, and even considering the technical limitations and simplicity mentioned above, It’s hard not to play Echoes of wisdom and think, “This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

I’m so glad people loved the freedom and go-anywhere-do-something approach Breath of the wild And Tears of the kingdom. These are great games, and they are, unequivocally and undeniably, Legend of Zelda Games. But, for me, they are not the “classic Seldom Game” I’d been looking forward to. They weren’t telling the same story I had gotten so invested in. Echoes of wisdom Is.

If you’ve been waiting for the series to return to its roots, it’s not quite that. The food system, the map, how side quests are handled, the freedom of traversal, all of these things return in one form or another in the same way they have since 2017. But there are dungeons now, real dungeons with Real puzzles, and sometimes it’s top-down and sometimes the camera switches to a side-on view like Zelda II: The Adventures of Link.

in Echoes of wisdom You can launch a flying tile echo and ride on it like a hoverboard, and you can create cubes of water in thin air and swim across large gaps. It is a “dream dojo” where you can perform combat challenges. Cuckoo Wrestling is back! It’s fun, it’s packed with features you may or may not use, and for new and longtime fans of the series, it’s absolutely worth playing—just expect a bit of framerate whining when you’re walking into big, bright areas.