If I can be blunt, the open world style of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are starting to stagnate for me. Growing up with bomb titles like Twilight Princess, Ocarina of Time, and Majora’s Mask, I had a set understanding in my mind of what made Zelda games so great – the puzzles, the adventure, and the gradual progression as you conquer every boss and dungeon. Breath of the Wild (BOTW) and Tears of the Kingdom (TOTK) are fantastic entry in the series, no doubt, but now that some time has passed, I feel that the open world concept has diluted the classic formula that many of us love and came to expect out of a mainline Zelda game. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was a sweet little treat for those who enjoyed some concepts introduced in BOTW, yet still craved the formula that was perfected early on in games like A Link to the Past.
Echoes of Wisdom (EOW) rolls up its sleeves and takes a DIY approach to puzzle solving, similar to BOTW, while still following a relatively linear story line. With Tri as your companion in crime, you obtain the all mighty power of… copy and paste?
Zelda’s new ability and core mechanic in the game is a feature called creating Echoes. This ability that you get early on in the game enables you to copy objects and monsters you come across, from blobs and mobs to statues and water cubes. So, the means to the end on this adventure is yours to dictate, whether you choose to summon an army of monsters to fight your battles or conjure every day objects like beds and clouds to parkour your way around challenges.
This freedom is where much of the charm and fun of the game was held for me. It was fun to compare outcomes and styles of play with my wife, who beat the game before I started playing it. As an example, I primarily used the yellow platform monster, floating tiles, and clouds to traverse the world, while she mostly used water and flying monsters. When in combat, I enjoyed (perhaps a bit too much) the chaos of summoning a half-dozen Beyblades to fight my battles. There is no one clear way to play the game, so in that sense, it’s similar to BOTW with its own cute flavors to set it apart.
If you’re more the type to get your hands dirty, you can combat monsters the classic way with Swordfighter form. As you progress in the game, you pick up various equipment dropped by the damsel Link, which enables you to take on his form for a few seconds and slash away. The time you can use this form can be lengthened by upgrading said equipment using special crystals found throughout the map.
Along the way of hopping from one summoned bed to another, you’ll find plenty of quirky quests to keep you entertained, like fetching some item, getting rid of some monsters, or showing someone an Echo you captured. None of them are too involved or complicated, which I can honestly appreciate, because I think Nintendo was going for more of a simple adventure and not another BOTW with a multitude of long, branching quests. The simple quests kept the linear gameplay flowing at a decent pace while also keeping everything fresh and fun.
Adding a sprinkle of variety to the game, at one point there was also a neat line of optional mini-games that did provide a pleasant challenge. The objective in these mini-games is to beat every monster in a given area within a specified amount of time using either every tool at your disposal or sometimes using only what’s in the room at the time.
Here, you can also revisit the boss fights that you’ve encountered throughout the adventure, which were surprisingly fun! Finding that weak spot is as enjoyable and iconic as ever in this latest Zelda entry, while also adding another layer of satisfaction through summoning whichever Echo you wish to finish the job.
As enjoyable as it was, part of me was left wishing for more challenges like this interspersed throughout the game rather than it being condensed in one section. How cool would it have been to get used to using your favorite monsters for every encounter just to have it temporarily taken away at a later point? Maybe that would have been a lot of work for minimal payout in the game’s development phase – how and why would Zelda lose her echoes at these points? How often would it happen, and would it get tiring to the players? Pardon my musings, I’ve never made a game before, I’m just wondering what could have given the game a bit more zip, but I digress.
Some of the side quests were so precious that it was hard not to go ‘awww’! My favorite quest – minor spoilers ahead – involved a mystery surrounding some missing armor at Hyrule Castle. Amid a crisis of evil clones replacing some of the townsfolk, it was assumed that a clone had taken it. Your objective is to question each guard and pinpoint the perpetrator. At length, we learn that the cause for the missing armor was not due to a wicked entity, but a local boy who wanted to help rid his home of evil, and when he saw the armor lying around, he took it and pretended to be a soldier to help fight. Awww!
All the characters are stinkin’ cute to say the least, and every interaction has a heartwarming bit of dialogue worthy of savor. The character interactions and art style perfectly played into the cozy and cute toy-like aesthetic.
While many of the puzzles throughout the game are fun and satisfying, most are fairly simplistic. If you’re looking for a cozy and cute puzzle game, this is it, but to those looking for a challenging puzzle, you may be disappointed. It ain’t no Professor Layton game in that fashion. The puzzles mainly consist of using your Tri Rod to plug the right objects into the right slots, move boulders to reveal the hidden entrances, and pull open hidden doors. I’d say the toughest puzzles offered in this game is Dampe’s short quests of building the automatons, where you need to show him a monster based on a somewhat vague description and after finding the accompanying item he requests, he’ll make you one of several robotic monsters that sometimes comes in handy. Nothing satisfyingly difficult to satisfy my masochism. Maybe I need to slacken this critique up a bit since I’m not exactly the target audience anymore… *sighs in millennial*
Anyway, the gameplay is largely the same as playing a conjurer build in Skyrim. Most encounters played out with me summoning an assortment of monsters from the ‘Most Used’ list, because filtering through the menagerie of Echoes is like eating spaghetti by slurping one noodle at a time. It’s tedious to scroll through the linear list one monster at a time until you find what you’re looking for, and while the sorted lists can help you out a bit, it’s not so helpful when you need a specific Echo that you haven’t used in a while. It would have been preferable to have a page system where you could scan a bundle of monsters at once then flip to the next page of Echoes. Anything to get away from the menu scrolling!
To touch on the graphics and performance, I found no noteworthy misdemeanors. There was one moment when I had six monsters fighting a mob of enemies at once, which caused some shaky performance and framerate dropping, but that in no way made the game unplayable. In fact, I didn’t notice any framerate drops at any other point in the game. Maybe I don’t notice those sort of things because I’m a filthy casual, but as far as I can tell, this game performs well on Switch, at least while in docked mode.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a sweet and pleasant casual experience, warming my heart with cute and lively graphics and animations with personality to spare. It may not present many challenges for the thrill seekers, but I will happily forgive that for the numerous times that it has put a smile on my face. Echoes of Wisdom is a return to formula that is worthy of praise and a great game for gamers of all ages and experience levels.
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