Review: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

It’s hard not to fixate on playing as Zelda in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Link has been the mainstay player character in the series since its inception, barring some smaller moments and the collective hallucinations that were the CDi titles. So, this has been a long time coming.

But it would take more than simply being able to wear a dress to get me excited. Zelda is about as blank-slate as Link. Her personality changes depending on the needs of the game, and most of the time, she still manages to be the most boring person in the room. Thankfully Echoes of Wisdom is more than just a dress-wearer. It instead mixes elements from the series to create something distinct with appropriately mixed results.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Switch [Reviewed])
Developer: Nintendo, Grezzo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: September 26, 2024
MSRP: $59.99

You start off playing the familiar green-skirted hero, Link. You’re given a tutorial on exactly how to Link, which would be a clever misdirection if Echoes of Wisdom didn’t give away the plot on its cover. With your sword and shield, you fight Link to the Past-era Ganon, but on the edge of success, the ground opens up and swallows Link.

Zelda, who was inexplicably captured before the events of the game, then steps into the player character’s shoes. It seems that Hyrule has been getting swallowed up by sinister-looking rifts, sucking in whoever was standing there at the time. As Zelda, you need to find a way to close them and rescue the people (including Link), along with your insanely generic assist partner, Tri.

The big twist on the Zelda formula is that you can conjure items into the environment, and typical gameplay has you figure out how to use them to bypass obstacles. In that way, it’s a lot like Tears of the Kingdom. Even despite its top-down perspective and less complicated physics engine, it also feels a lot like Tears of the Kingdom, which is fine. It invites a lot of comparison to a much larger game on the same system, but at least Echoes of Wisdom has classic dungeons.

You can also create any non-boss enemy in the game, and there’s something deeply satisfying about fighting alongside a Moblin. Zelda herself is mostly relegated to pulling something heavy from the ether and hurling it at her foes. Not far into the game, she obtains the ability to essentially transform into Link and fight more familiarly, but the transformation is on a rather short timer, meaning you can’t just choose to play as Link for the whole game.

On the other hand, you can fill that bar using a properly mixed smoothie, which Echoes of Wisdom is strangely obsessed with. Throughout your adventures, you’ll be tripping over apples and blocks of butter, which you can then take to a friendly Deku Scrub to mix into a usable item with a variety of properties. It’s a bit like the cooking system in Breath of the Wild, but far less deep.

The obsession with smoothies has another downside, which is that Echoes of Wisdom thinks that ingredients are a worthwhile reward. There’s not much more deflating than completing a sidequest or climbing to an out-of-reach treasure chest and finding that it contains five cacti. I’m not expecting a heart piece every time I find someone’s cat, but I was carrying an entire grocery store of unused food by the time I finished the game.

It’s going to sound like I’m really down on Echoes of Wisdom for a lot of this review, but I want to stress that this is because it doesn’t really hold up to the comparisons that it sets itself up for. It uses the world of Link to the Past with its borders extended and parts of it jumbled around a bit, but it never comes close to matching it. Its echo system has a way of making you feel clever, but it’s nowhere near the level that Tears of the Kingdom does. However, it’s a decent game in its own right.

I’m happy to see the return of the art style used for the Link’s Awakening remake. I think the toylike look of it is very charming, and it does a good job of evoking the 2D games of the series. However, like Link’s Awakening, the framerate is extremely inconsistent. That hasn’t been changed. Traveling the world means seeing the game start to chug frequently. It’s bad enough that a sudden drop in framerate threw me off during a mini-game and resulted in me failing it. Not the end of the world, but never something you like to see.

I was never married to the overworld/dungeon format of pre-Breath of the Wild games, but it’s nice to see Echoes of Wisdom return to it for variety’s sake. Usually, dungeons are also preceded by segments in the “Still World” where chunks of landscape float in empty space, sometimes at unusual angles. The challenges here are usually not as intricate as the dungeons themselves, but they’re decent appetizers.

For that matter, the dungeons are a bit of a letdown. Unfortunately, they chose Link to the Past’s world as the setting, because the monotonous delves really stand in stark contrast to the thematically-focused ones of the SNES title. Despite having completed the game just last night and having cleared the whole thing in a brief timeframe, I would struggle to tell you how each dungeon differentiated itself. I could tell you how the Zora one is unique, but nothing beyond that.

This may be a side-effect of the echo system; it’s hard to fine-tune puzzles when there are so many things to account for. When experimentation is encouraged, it’s hard to prevent shortcuts. There was one recurring puzzle where you needed to place a block on two tiles simultaneously. I was able to figure out a method that bypassed however the designer intended you to solve it that worked every time.

But in the absence of a solution to that self-inflicted pain, most of the puzzles are figuring out how to place an object on a switch or simply traversing difficult terrain. As a result, everything becomes monotonous, and that feeling continues to grow as you proceed. I became very proficient at traversal and switch operation, so everything became routine halfway through.

For a game that encourages the player to use their creative imagination, there’s a noticeable lack of imagination in the design of Echoes of Wisdom. It feels like the development team was pushing against limitations that weren’t there and came up short. As I said, in its own right, it’s a decent game, it’s just not a particularly memorable Zelda game, which is sort of ironic.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom puts a new spin on the series’ formula but never quite finds itself. I like coming up with creative ways to use as bed as much as the next person, but I’d prefer if the challenges were more consistently creative in return. Instead, things just bled together until I could have just played on autopilot. It takes more than a dress and a bed to keep things interesting.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game purchased by the reviewer.]}