One of my favourite Zelda games is A Link Between Worlds (ALBW). The wall merge ability completely changes the way you interact with puzzles and that’s never more evident than in the subtle ways that Nintendo plays with the perspective through which you see the world. There’s a moment in the Tower of Hera where you’re seemingly trapped outside; not by enemies or a puzzle though, but by the perspective. The only option is to merge to get a glimpse of your surroundings which reveals a grate and your escape is made. By forcing a fixed perspective on the player, Nintendo further highlights merging as one of your key tools for navigating the world but with a subtlety that still provides a satisfying aha moment when you figure it out.
When Echoes of Wisdom was announced, then, I was extremely excited. I thought I was in for another transformative gameplay experience full of those ALBW moments. I got some of those, but what I also got were some frustrations - mostly around mechanics that didn’t feel fully integrated with the full package. I had a pretty good time playing it, but It felt like it wasn’t hitting the heights I felt it could have with a little more connectivity between its ideas.
The tables have turned this time around: Link is lost and Zelda is all that’s left between Hyrule and its destruction by expanding rifts. She’s not completely alone though. She’s joined, Navi style, by a small spirit called Tri who gives her the power of Echo creating - allowing her to create objects and enemies out of thin air. In classic Zelda style you must travel to the corners of the world to save them from peril, exploring dungeons, solving puzzles and fighting (kind of) enemies along the way.
It’s a pretty standard Zelda set-up, which has worked really well in the past, but it perhaps felt a little too familiar for me after a while. Stealthing my way past deku scrubs was fun and I loved my time with the Zora. I found the squabbling river and sea tribes to be really endearing and their quarrel being about music brought back memories of Majora’s Mask, another favourite of mine. But while it was nice to see the Goron’s and Gerudo in the Link’s Awakening art style, the previous 2 entries (Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom) did such a nice job of characterising those races that the familiarity of them here left me feeling a little disappointed. Given how much has changed with regard to gameplay freedom, it would’ve been really nice to see those changes enacted across the whole game.
That gameplay freedom comes in the form of that new echo ability. If you come across a glimmering object it means that Zelda can copy it to a database of echoes that can be summoned at will to cross between platforms, solve puzzles and fight monsters. I think the echoes are best discussed when broken down into 2 types: exploration/puzzles and combat. Combat is definitely the weaker of these 2 echo types. When encountering a foe, you can summon a monster, be it moblin or keese, to fight in your stead. This is interesting as a concept, but in practice it makes for some wonky fight pacing. You cast your chosen warrior and watch as they tackle your enemy, waiting for it to fall - it isn’t the most exciting experience. As a way of combating this problem, Zelda can also take on swordfighter form. Essentially, she can turn into Link for a short period of time to aid your echoes in combat. The ability has a power metre that drains as you use it which can be recharged by collecting little L shaped energy crystals from enemies that inhabit the Still World; Echoes’ dark world that exists inside the rifts. There are small combat encounters out in the overworld that will net you a nice treasure chest once completed - but as I’ll come to in a little bit, the rewards were rarely worth it for me. Between that and the fact that temples and boss fights take place in the still world, giving you a healthy supply of swordfighter energy when you need it, combat never manages to strike a compelling balance.
Exploration and puzzle echoes are trickier. The first few hours of play were brilliant, using the bed echo to cross gaps and using water blocks to scale walls was incredibly satisfying, but very quickly, it was clear Echoes had inherited one of Tears of the Kingdom’s biggest issues - menu management. Picking an echo is done in much the same way you choose an item to fuse to arrows in Tears of the Kingdom - a long line of items with lacklustre filtering options. It makes handling the very large number of echoes you receive a real hassle. This sounds like a big issue, but I think it’s alleviated by the fact you can get by in the game just fine with a handful. Some of the early echoes are so effective at traversal that it becomes almost unnecessary to use any others. A mixture of stairs and a table are enough to climb most cliff faces and a spider will get you the rest of the way if not. There wasn’t really much incentive for me to use anything other than the same few because they were so good at solving my problems, and it was a hassle to sift through the rest. Having lots of items that do the same thing was an ongoing problem for me, especially when it came to solving puzzles.
I’ve thought a lot about it since playing and, for me, as the game went on it began to feel like the echoes were just taking the place of classic Zelda items. There may be seven ways to create fire, but the puzzle structure hasn’t changed enough to make that worthwhile. If the use case for fire echoes in puzzles is only lighting a lamp or melting ice, then using a fire keese over an ignizol (fire blob) doesn’t affect how the puzzle is solved, only what creature I watch light the lamp. It’s not so different from just giving me a fire arrow. In Tears of the Kingdom, many of the puzzles are left open-ended and each tool can be used in tandem in several different ways. Here, the echoes don’t really communicate mechanically and it begins to feel like there’s only one use for them, which is reflected in the way many of the puzzles are designed - it looks like freedom but the tasks you’re doing are rarely open-ended enough to allow for that freedom to flourish.
This sounds pretty negative, but it’s because I think there’s a lot of potential here. There was a moment in the water temple where I was able to skip a good 2 thirds of the temple by spidering up a wall I was supposed to raise the water level for. This was one of those ALBW aha moments, and is also one of the things that makes freedom so great - it made me feel clever for solving it my way even though I’ve no doubt the developers had set that up on purpose. There just aren’t enough of these moments though and between not needing 85% of echoes and some close-ended puzzles it leaves a little to be desired.
I think this is exacerbated by Grezzo’s attempts to expand the overworld top-down formula falling a little short too. When not tackling temples, the world is littered with side quests and mini rifts that will garner you various rewards. Mini rifts upgrade Tri’s echo making abilities and side quests might give you rupees or heart pieces, but more often than not they’ll give you smoothie ingredients. Smoothies, like Breath of the Wild’s cooking system, are a way of giving Zelda health regeneration and various buffs against the elements. However, they never feel fully implemented. Between health potions, fairies and pins (items Zelda can equip for buffs), there are so many ways of solving health problems that I never felt the need to use them. The other issue is, unlike Tears of the Kingdom where you’re given the ability to cook anywhere, Echoes of Wisdom requires you to go to a set location. This wouldn’t be a big deal for me if they didn’t already feel a little unnecessary but making them also a bit of a pain to make means I’m even less likely to engage with that system. Coming back around to the side quests then; given that most of the rewards for exploration and side questing were smoothie ingredients, I quickly found myself uninterested in exploring and completing them. It’s a shame, since I think if the exploration was exciting and rewarding, it could’ve helped develop the echos further, which without many exciting uses outside of dungeons left a lot of them feeling a little under-utilised.
I’ve been pretty hard on Echoes of Wisdom throughout this review but as I’ve said, it’s because I think there’s a lot here that almost works, just a couple pieces don’t fit together in quite the right way for me to really enjoy it. Grezzo have done a remarkable job of their first attempt at an original Zelda game, and I think that with some refinement the echo idea could really settle into something exciting. As it stands though, I don’t think The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom quite manages to create the freedom of Tears of the Kingdom or hold onto that feeling of satisfaction of A Link Between Worlds long enough to stick with me once I was finished. I recommend it if you’re a Zelda fan - there’s a lot to love in the experience - but it echoes perhaps a few too many problems from the past to be a truly successful evolution of the classic formula.
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