youUnlike Princess Peach, who waits in a castle to be rescued from Bowser, Zelda has never been a damsel. She’s always had magical powers, even in the early days of the series, when she recruited Link, a green-clad swordsman, to save the kingdom. For the past two decades, since 2003’s Wind Waker, Zelda and Link have been something of a team: they’re friends, companions, a powerful ruler, and his loyal knight. But still, we, the players, have always taken on Link’s role in the story. Echoes of Wisdom is Zelda’s first starring role in the series that bears her name. Ominous rifts have appeared across the kingdom of Hyrule, sucking in its citizens, where entire parts of the landscape are trapped in suspended animation. Zelda can step through these rifts and close them, after conquering the dungeon within.
The main difference between Link and Zelda is that Zelda can’t fight. Instead, with a magic staff, she can summon material “echoes” of real objects out of thin air, which can be anything from a hunk of meat to distract monsters to boxes and tables to build towers and stairs around. When you encounter Zelda’s usual selection of deceptively gentle-looking monsters, you can simply conjure a spear-wielding Moblin or some bats to take them out for you. Or, failing that, you can manifest a pot and throw it at whatever’s threatening you.
The problem with this is that in reality… sought To fight. Summoning creatures and waiting for them to finish fighting isn’t much fun, and neither is throwing rocks at fast-moving enemies. I appreciated that not having any weapons forced me to think differently than I normally would in a Zelda game, but sometimes you just want to pull out a bow and get the job done. Developer Grezzo seems to have realised this, as you can temporarily transform into a Link-like swordsman to attack things yourself with sword slashes and arrows, but this is limited by a stingy energy meter, meaning you rarely get to use it outside of boss battles.
This isn’t the only instance where a complicated system is introduced to compensate for the limitations of a different complicated system. Summoning items doesn’t let you beat every puzzle, so Zelda can also telepathically move rocks and furniture – a feature I actually forgot about for a couple hours of play until I suddenly needed it again. She takes more damage than Link because she’s unarmed, so I’d end up conjuring a bed every 10 minutes for her to rest on and regain hearts. Some echoes have very specific applications, like the spider that can attach itself to the ceiling to create a web rope to climb on, and with 50 or 60 echoes in your library, remembering which ones are useful in certain situations feels like a chore.
Scrolling through all the echoes to find the one you want is also a pain. I almost always felt like there was some distance between me and the fun. Last year’s Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was also a pain, but in that game Link’s ability to move objects and build crazy contraptions also came with a huge amount of flexibility. It created new options for approaching almost any situation: faced with a chasm, you could repair a rickety bridge, build one yourself from trees you could cut down yourself, or build a flying machine to fly over it. Echoes of Wisdom aims for this, but it doesn’t quite achieve that same sense of possibility, and I often felt like I was skirting around things. Instead of one elegant solution to each puzzle, arrived at through satisfying deduction, there are several inelegant solutions arrived at through trial and error.
Here’s an example: I was stuck for ages trying to figure out a way to cross over to a chest on a pillar in a patch of quicksand. The quicksand meant I couldn’t build a tower to the top, and I couldn’t build a long enough bridge with beds to cross over. In retrospect, what I probably should have done was try to grab it telepathically and move it down. Instead, I summoned a bird and tied myself to it, hoping it would eventually fly in the right direction to drop me onto the pillar. It eventually worked, but it took a while. agesand instead of feeling clever when I finally opened that chest, I just felt annoyed.
Over time, I got used to Echoes of Wisdom’s new way of doing things, but I didn’t like it. There’s a lot to say. as In particular, the achingly cute, toy-like aesthetic, which makes Hyrule look a bit like a giant Polly Pocket, and Zelda’s adorable horse. It’s a good game, and its mix of interlocking ideas brings something new to Zelda. But I hope that the next time we play as Zelda, we’ll feel more empowered.
After the newsletter promotion