by Players have been clamoring for Hyrule as the titular princess of the series for as long as I can remember. Super Smash Bros. Melee teased players with the kind of abilities a playable Zelda would have, but Zelda herself has been the protagonist of a Legend of Zelda game to date, with Echoes of Wisdom. It should feel like a huge moment, but it’s a little too forgettable.
As you explore Hyrule, you’ll probably forget you’re even playing as Zelda. She moves and looks a lot like Link in Link’s Awakening, and the fact that you’re the princess of Hyrule is rarely more relevant. The main differences are in Zelda’s moveset. She does have a sword and shield that she can use in exchange for a limited amount of energy, but outside of those moments (best saved for difficult enemies and boss encounters) she mainly uses the Tri Rod to produce echoes of, well yes, anything and everything. everything.
Early on in the game your only real method of defeating monsters is to pick up a rock and throw it at them to deal damage, but you quickly learn that rocks, beds, and soon enemies (but mainly beds that can be slept in ) to spawn. to regain health, but this will be your main puzzle-solving technique for much of the game). This turns combat into a miniature RTS, with your playable hero character appearing in various obstacles to take out enemies. Enemies have natural weaknesses – slow enemies won’t do much against ranged attacks, and grounded monsters are vulnerable to air creatures – and experimenting with your available Echoes to find the best method to meet each challenge is a big part of the fun.
You can learn echoes from virtually every enemy in the game, which has the unfortunate side effect of making the game easier as you progress. While you’ll spend the first hour hastily picking up and throwing rocks, you’ll soon spawn a small army of monsters and sit back as you watch the action unfold. It has the feel of those Elden Ring mods where you can pit bosses against each other to see who would win. These are all familiar Zelda enemies, and now you can discover which is more threatening: a gang of Bokoblins or three Peahats. To be clear, my money is almost always on the Peahats.
Once one of your Echoes is destroyed, you can immediately put your resources into something else, with no cooldown. This means that you can constantly spawn enemies on the field, and only the strongest monsters and dungeon bosses can withstand that kind of attack. Zelda’s orb companion, Tri, is followed by a tail of triangles, and each echo you make costs a certain number of triangles. Some may require just one, others may require several, or perhaps even more than your current total. This is the only thing stopping you from filling the world with creatures and beds. Lots of beds.
Echoes aren’t just for battle, they’re also for exploration. The bed is one of the first echoes you get and you can use it to create a makeshift staircase just about anywhere. Ascending to higher altitudes is faster if you get the Water Block, and beds lose their relevance completely if you can spawn a floating cloud, but the game encourages experimentation so you discover what works best for you.
Echoes of Wisdom draws heavily on influences from both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. It has the same elements of freedom – and the same ability to spawn pretty much anything you want, whenever you want, in the case of TOTK – just without some limitations, like stamina. These same design philosophies of an open approach feel very different in a traditional top-down Zelda setting. From playing games like A Link to the Past and Minish Cap, I know that Link can’t just climb on walls to jump to the next part of the map. In Echoes of Wisdom, Zelda can certainly do that. You can freely climb atop trees and walls, allowing you to ignore intended paths and make your own way through the game, until you reach a chasm.
Rifts are literal blocks of progress, impassable voids that tear the map apart. With Tri’s help, Zelda is able to close these rifts by rescuing Tri’s friends trapped within them, increasing Tri’s ability to create echoes. Finding Tri’s friends within a canyon is a lot of fun, the inside of each canyon turns parts of the environment on their side. Floors become walls, trees hang in a void and you can swim up through ponds to reach new areas. The exploration of each rift is brilliant, and despite solving a few over the course of the game, I could have happily gone through a few more.
However, there are traditional dungeons. Dungeons break the open approach somewhat and re-implement small keys, dungeon maps and the usual trappings. In dungeons, your ability to solve problems and use echoes is essential to clearing each room, and while the puzzles are rarely difficult, clearing through a dungeon and tapping off each hidden chest is as satisfying as ever.
But it doesn’t always work flawlessly. For example, bosses are mostly damage sponges, and you mostly just spawn echoes on repeat, while occasionally using your own Link-like abilities. Even one, which forces the use of specific ice or fire attacks, doesn’t feel like a puzzle. And that’s what Zelda bosses have always been: puzzles in which you learn which attack or item you use during which animation you can deal damage. It just wasn’t the case in Breath of the Wild, or Tears of the Kingdom, or now in Echoes of Wisdom. With the more traditional approach to dungeon design, a traditional approach to bosses would have been nice too.
On the other hand, there are small caves in Hyrule and each cave has a short dungeon-like puzzle in it, and they are reminiscent of Shrines. Rewards from each cave aren’t guaranteed to be useful, but they are satisfying and heavily influenced by the open world titles. Side quests are also present, encouraging you to revisit towns and characters to unlock items, outfits, echoes and even Zelda’s horse. You get Pieces of Heart and resources to upgrade your sword – for the few moments you actually use it.
To flip the script again, exploring the overworld is accompanied by consistent frame rate instability that almost completely disappears when standing still or indoors. It didn’t ruin my experience, but it was impossible not to notice, and it really made me hope that the upcoming Nintendo Switch successor will spell the end of these kinds of problems.
Yes, there are a handful of hiccups and issues that prevent Echoes of Wisdom from being a masterpiece, an all-time classic Zelda game, but it’s still brilliant. The Echoes completely renew how you approach the exploration of a top-down Zelda world. While I certainly wouldn’t trade this echo RTS minigame for traditional Zelda combat in the series as a whole, it’s a nice side step and a fun experiment. I would absolutely play a direct sequel to Echoes of Wisdom with the same approach, but maybe not a trilogy.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a beautiful way to return to Hyrule, and the echo system breathes new life into the experience of exploring this world. From combat to exploration, your approach will be very different from any other Zelda game, and that makes Echoes of Wisdom worth playing. While it’s not quite a Zelda masterpiece, it’s certainly an essential Nintendo Switch game.
Score: 9/10
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Make sure you read through our Echoes of Wisdom tips and tricks before playing the game.
