During its surprise reveal in June’s Nintendo Direct broadcast, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was presented as a new kind of LoZ adventure, one where Zelda herself takes center stage and leans on her innate intelligence and creativity as she seeks to save both Hyrule and the series’ traditional hero, Link. Using “echoes,” recreations of common items and enemies, to both vanquish foes and traverse the environment, it looked like a wholly different take on our beloved franchise.
Now, having played through the game in its entirety (which, my Switch assures me, took “25 hours or more”), I’m happy to report that it really is a fun new permutation of the expected Legend of Zelda experience—albeit one that doesn’t find it necessary to throw away all the conventions that make the series what it is.
Kicking things off where previous games typically end—with a pitched boss battle—Echoes of Wisdom quickly reverses the conventional roles. With Link now numbered among those missing from the growing otherworldly rifts, it falls to Zelda to save him and her kingdom from ruin. But shenanigans within Hyrule Castle quickly land her in the dungeon, seemingly cutting short her mission before it even begins.
Enter Tri.
This magical new ally gifts Zelda the Tri Rod, an artifact that can generate echoes, copies of objects and characters used to best enemies and uncover the underlying mystery of the rifts themselves.
Obviously, the echoes are the selling point here, but just as abilities like Ultrahand and Autobuild helped Tears of the Kingdom feel fresh and new without losing the charm and wonder of Breath of the Wild, the Tri Rod makes the tilt-shifted world of Links Awakening feel even more immersive.
Early on, Zelda learns to echo pedestrian fare like clay pots, old beds, and those trusty crates. Stacking and rearranging them can help her cross difficult terrain, avoid troublesome baddies, and unravel the game’s requisite puzzles. Best of all, the control scheme makes the whole affair dead simple.
Learn an echo by approaching a glowing item—or, later, a defeated enemy—and pressing ZR. Your growing list of echoes (and trust me, it grows fast) can be accessed by pressing right on the d-pad. You can then scroll through your collection and cycle through a number of helpful sorting options (Last Learned, Most Used, Type, etc.) to select just the echo for the task at hand.
Press Y to create your currently active echo, and echoes can be just as easily unmade by pressing ZR while standing next to them or long-holding ZR to erase all echoes on the field.
It’s important to note here that echoes, like all things in life, come at a cost. The higher the cost, the fewer concurrent echoes Zelda can generate. Small common items, like rocks and the ever-helpful water blocks, have the lowest value. While flashier echoes—think strong enemies like Wizzrobes or high-level Moblins—have a significantly loftier cost.
Whether crossing a sizable gap or battling a big boss, these costs must stay front of mind. How many monster echoes you can summon to fight on your behalf or how many sturdy tables you can produce to get Zelda over that ledge depends on the relative cost. And if you try to produce more echoes than you have available energy, your earlier echoes will disappear. As you can imagine, when you’re dangling precariously over a bottomless pit balanced on a series of bed echoes, losing an anchor item can spell disaster.
The solution, then, is to build up your Tri Rod’s power, and this happens organically as you and Tri find and close rifts. Doing so releases not only frozen Hyrulians but also Tri’s trapped friends, who give him their power, which he politely shares with you.
This increases the power available to Zelda’s Tri Rod by reducing the cost of individual echoes, allowing her to travel further afield.
The basic flow of gameplay goes thusly:
- Explore new lands
- Learn new echoes
- Use these echoes to help your countrymen both directly (via side quests) and by closing small rifts
- Use the energy freed from smaller rifts to access the bigger rifts and defeat their guardians
- This, in turn, opens up even more areas to explore
As you can see, it’s really just Zelda 101. Sure, the echoes are a new twist, but the core LoZ experience—that fan-favorite DNA—is still there underneath it all. Plus, echoes aren’t the only arrow in Zelda’s proverbial quiver.
Her travels across Hyrule and the Still World beyond the rifts lead Zelda to even more formidable powers.
In time, Zelda and Tri learn to Bind objects, allowing even massive boulders to follow the duo, unblocking paths and unlocking new adventures. They can also use Reverse Bond, locking onto objects and monsters and having Zelda follow their movements.
Zelda herself even learns to morph into swordfighter form, taking on the aspect and abilities of Link, letting her get a few licks in first-hand against more robust enemies and rift bosses.
To be honest, I was a little turned off by this at first. Wasn’t essentially turning Zelda into Link just undermining the glorious difference that makes Echoes of Wisdom so great?
I’ll fully admit, though, that I was wrong. Like the echo mechanic, the swordfighter form is tightly controlled by a steadily depleting energy gauge. While it can be replenished and, as the game progresses, supplemented, these sequences are brief as they are satisfying. More often than not, I’d find myself using them only in tight situations, against mobs of overland enemies or stunned mini-bosses, and often alongside those titular echoes rather than instead of them.
With outfits to unlock, accessories to purchase, citizens to aid, and ingredients to harvest—the smoothie-making feature may not be as fun as the other mini-games, but they are the perfect way to keep Zelda’s health and energy topped off—this take on Hyrule feels just as fun and exciting as the rest, and I found that much extra joy in the returning diorama-like art style of 2019’s superb Link’s Awakening remake.
Unsurprisingly, given its pedigree, the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is another Nintendo Switch first-party must-play. The preternatural eeriness of Still World makes it a fine pick-up for the Halloween season (alongside other recent releases the Castlevania Dominus Collection and Emio – The Smiling Man), and its perfectly polished gameplay and worlds-spanning story are sure to please Zelda fans of all stripes.
While obviously not as expansive in scope as its open-world forebears (Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom), Echoes of Wisdom hits the perfect sweet spot between massive console undertaking and portable pick-up-and-play goodness (a la Oracle of Ages/Oracle of Seasons). Like the Switch itself, it straddles two worlds but still manages to deliver on both fronts.
Review materials provided by Nintendo of America. This post contains affiliate links. And don’t even get me started about those delightful Adventure of Link-style 2D transitional levels!
