The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Echoes of Wisdom’s presumed goal was to find a happy medium between the rigid linearity of classic 2D Zelda and the experimental openness of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. A middle ground between the two does exist here, but I ultimately felt pulled in both directions without ever feeling fully satisfied with either. Sometimes I wanted to be able to experiment more, and sometimes I wanted to experience the joy of solving a defined puzzle with a specific item. But in the end, I finally got to experience a full, proper, no-asterisk Zelda adventure without having to explain, “Actually, you play as Link,” and I am grateful for the experience.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is the first brand-new top-down adventure in almost a decade. Fans might be used to long pauses between outings, but Echoes was worth the wait. It not only introduces Zelda’s first canonical solo adventure, but merges familiar and new to create an incredibly creative and beautiful experience. Despite some graphical load issues, let’s just say Zelda’s first adventure presents a strong contender for 2024’s Switch game of the year.

Doomscrolling complaints aside, I had an absolute blast playing Echoes of Wisdom. I’ve been a fan of the previous open-world Legend of Zelda games, as you can tell by my other reviews, but there truly is something else about the old style games that was missing, and this game brought them back in a familiar yet refreshing way. I hadn’t realised how much I missed this style of gameplay until I was hours deep into Echoes of Wisdom and caught myself grinning ear to ear!

No está mal, tampoco, y de hecho me ha gustado mucho el experimento de Grezzo a partir de la carcasa de su genial remake de Link’s Awakening. Creo que es un juego muy sólido para ser tan claramente de serie B; muy pocas compañías pueden presumir, como sí puede hacerlo Nintendo, de dejar para cuando haya un hueco que cubrir proyectos como este. Y supongo que había que probar en algún momento a combinar la nueva naturaleza zeldesca con las formas antiguas, y nada mejor para eso que hacerlo sobre las bases de uno de los Zeldas más antiguos y extravagantes.

There’s a unique thrill to playing as Zelda: Sorcerer Supreme, but some hours into Echoes of Wisdom, especially the more that Zelda conjures bigger and badder creatures to smite her enemies, it still leaves the player wondering when, exactly, we get to play as Zelda: The Hero of Time. Nintendo remains a market leader in giving players what they didn’t know they needed rather than what they adamantly wanted, and Echoes of Wisdom is an excellent showcase for why that is, but it’s hard to shake just how many of Zelda’s problems could be solved just by letting her have a sword and an ocarina in the first place.

That being said it feels slightly afraid of fully committing and some additional control over your echoes would greatly enhance the depth of gameplay. Dungeons return to a quality we haven’t seen in more than ten years and the musical presentation is excellent. Performance while consistently hitting 30 frames-per-second strains fruitlessly for 60. But ultimately Echoes of Wisdom excellently weaves itself into the grand tapestry of Zelda with surprising originality while being careful never to trample on what has come before.