There’s plenty of tropes that have persisted through the 35-year history of The Legend of Zelda, the developers over the decades painting with the same motifs of Triforces, a battle through the ages with Ganon and Ganondorf, and a young boy in a green tunic for the hero. It’s a testament to the series creators that they’ve still been able to tell such compelling tales while using the same brush and colour palette. But it’s also time for a change. With The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom it’s time for Zelda to be the hero of her own story.
Now it’s time for Zelda to save the land of Hyrule from a great peril, as it’s Link and not Zelda that’s sucked into mysterious purple rifts that are spreading across the land. And that simple-sounding change of protagonist brings with it massive changes for how this game actually works. Nintendo and developer Grezzo could have simply given Zelda a sword and shield and sent her out in a green dress, but instead they’ve cooked up wholly new and refreshing gameplay ideas for her to journey with.
Presented with a Triwand by the helpful rift-healing sprite Tri, Zelda becomes more of a trickster wizard than a frontline brawler. The Triwand enables her to copy all manner of objects through that she find through the world and then summon them as ‘echoes’ to help her get around. Want to get up onto a ledge? Well, laying small tables, crates and beds can create an impromptu staircase to hop up. Need something to throw at the traditional Zelda game enemies? Summon a rock, pick it up and toss it at them! You’re limited only by the amount of energy pips that Tri has, and the temporary cost that each echo has.
There’s other abilities lent to Zelda by Tri more directly, namely being able to Bind to objects and move them around with Zelda, no matter how big they are, or to have Zelda lock to and move with them, such as with a moving platform. You can switch back and forth while linked, which brings huge possibilities together for the environmental puzzling. Attach to a wall-climbing spider, and you’ll get up and over that wall, no problem!
Once enemies are defeated for the first time, their form can also be absorbed into the Triwand and summoned forth at will, letting you bring forth echoes to fight for and defend you. It creates these quirky little battles where you either try to spam creatures at enemies, or actually apply a little bit of puzzle logic to the situation before you. Octorocks are pretty effective on water, as they sink and hop up to shoot at a target, but if it’s a flying enemy, maybe a steadily respawning swarm of Keese would do the trick instead? Thick grass? It’s time to set everything on fire with a Zol. Or you’d better set a Darknut against shrieking zombies, as they struggle to do any damage to its armour.
It’s often a bit messy, especially when there’s multiple enemy types, or battles are drawn out if you head to a more difficult spot early in the game, and Zelda’s mainly got to run away, avoid focus and the put her most powerful ability to use at exactly the right time: the Swordfighter form.
This effectively turns her into a blue spectral Link, sword in hand, able to wail upon enemies and deal a lot of more focused damage in short order. However, this drains the energy meter, which limits the amount of time this is available for. Inevitably, you save it for more special occasions, such as the damage phase of a boss battle after you’ve knocked it out through evasion and echo damage – handily these also tend to see a sprinkling of energy appear to top Zelda’s energy up.
Of course, maybe this is all just my playstyle, because it feels like there’s so much creativity and more options available to you, and you can express yourself a little more than you might initially expect. In combat, you can spam those echoes, or you could summon one and then Bind to hold it in front of you, perhaps. My go-to for bridging gaps and getting higher was simply to layer bed upon bed in gravity-defying fashion. Maybe you’d rather use a trampoline on occasion, or attach to a bird and let them take you places. Bed stairs are pretty handy though, because you can have a nap and regain health…
The main problem with this summoning system is that the way you access all the echoes you collect is with a single line horizontal list. You can filter it to be of the most recent summons, most used, most recently caught, and by category, but it’s always just a single endless list that you’re picking from, and that’s inherently unwieldy once you’ve got more than ten. You can access a grid-based inventory view in your notebook, but it’s still not a perfect system. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut of just constantly reusing the same echoes because of this – see my go-to stairs of beds.
It’s also pretty easy to be all fingers and thumbs when trying to do this in the heat of the moment. The echo selector does pause time – you should use the left bumper instead of the D-pad, always – but then targeting an echo under pressure is a bit tricky, and that’s before trying to use Tri’s ability to grab things. Some of the chaotic feel of combat simply comes from you not being directly involved, with only limited ability to direct echoes and them being slow to wind up their attacks, and the controls fundamentally being different to a traditional Zelda game.
There’s also a good few side-scrolling sections and light puzzle platforming, most commonly within the rifts and the Still World. Side-scrolling puts a different spin on how you use your abilities and echoes, a little sprinkling of something a bit different alongside the top-down adventure. There’s also other more incidental ideas, with costumes, smoothie blending, weapon upgrading, and charms to wear.
On the whole, it’s quite a light-feeling adventure, and a big part of that is thanks to the art style. Grezzo has continued on from their work on the Link’s Awakening remake, and it absolutely works for this game as well, the chunky character designs and world, the tilt shift-ish effect, and more generally the tone of the story that’s being told – some of the main quest stories feel particularly child friendly.
As gorgeous as this art style is, Echoes of Wisdom also has echoes of one of the nagging problems of the last time it was used. The Link’s Awakening remake had frame rate stutters aplenty, and that hasn’t been dispelled for this new game. It doesn’t really get in the way of the gameplay, given the general tone and pacing of this adventure, but it’s a shame to feel the frame rate juddering so often.
