Echoes of Wisdom is inventive, fun, and cute. It’s an incredibly refreshing Zelda game after seven years of 3d open world Zelda. Zelda is finally the protagonist! And it’s the first game to make me audibly laugh multiple times in a very very long time.
Note: This ones been sitting around for months and I just need to get it out before the end of the year
first, the annoying
Tri, the companion character, has absolutely no personality. Which is weird because Mario and Luigi Brothership’s companion character, Snoutlet, is loaded with personality. I guess they do show a little bit nearer the end of the game, but it was too little too late.
Also, what’s with Nintendo shoving companion characters everywhere they can lately? I say lately, but they did it a lot way back too. Feels like their obsession with companion characters is coming back.
A lot of the puzzles were real easy for me. I really do attribute this, however, to the fact that I’ve been playing Zelda games for as long as I’ve been playing video games, so at least 30 years. The puzzle genre is also one of my favorites. This might be on me more than the game. Probably related to this, the game felt short. I wish there was just more game, another dungeon or two probably would have felt just about right.
what I loved
So obviously I ADORED being able to play as Zelda herself! Link has always been so twinky and gender ambiguous, designed that way on purpose so that people of any gender can kinda place themselves on top of him, but with Zelda it finally felt a lot more right for me, a woman. This really does matter! And I was surprised how much it mattered to me.
Focusing more around Zelda’s wisdom really shaped the game design (though yes I know she’s an incredible weapon’s based fighter in MANY iterations, just like Link) in ways that I don’t think they could do with Link. The game is built around the Echoes mechanic that allows Zelda to learn an object/enemy/element and then recreate it to solve puzzles and traverse the world. It’s an expanded form of some mechanics from Tears of the Kingdom actually, but it felt I lot more refined to me. Playing around with every echo felt great and finding certain combinations was a lot of fun. Though personally I tend to get a bit bruteforce-y at times and one of my go to tactics was to, especially later when I could summon a lot more things, create a tower of octoroks that just PELTED though enemies.
The puzzles and dungeons were inventive; even if I did get them quickly I still found them quite unique and fun. The designers were definitely having fun using the new systems and I really appreciate that. I was regularly presented with new situations and new possible solutions that haven’t existed in previous Zelda games. It was a very refreshing experience.
The game did last longer than I expected! Sounds contradictory to the above, I’ll admit. It’s shorter than most other main line Zeldas, but it’s longer than the Oracle games and Link’s Awakening I’d say. Honestly maybe a sweet spot in terms of length. I only disliked the length because I wanted more of it. But I do absolutely recognize that it’s a really solid length for most people. And honestly, a shorter game is probably a good thing. 40 hours into Echoes is a lot more manageable than the 200+ I put into Tears..
I love that they reused the Link’s Awakening Switch Remake art style! It works really well for modern top down Zelda games and is just super cute. The music was fantastic, and they definitely had a lot more room to work with it, unlike the LA remake that was beholden to the original Gameboy tracks. Each area had such a unique sound that made them feel alive and like I had actually gone to a different region.
The Still World was pretty creepy and unique, but not over the top. It felt just right for the game and the art style. I wish they would have done a little bit more with it, because some of the later sequences in the Still World were fantastic and I wanted more of that.
I think that’s about it. I did actually finish this game before Phantasy Stars 1 and 4, but completely forgot about the draft of this post when I wrote up those two. Oh well!