The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom review – the Zelda where you are Zelda-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom – much better than The Wand Of Gamelon (Nintendo)

Princess Zelda is finally the star of the franchise that’s named after her, in a charming new action adventure with a clever new puzzle twist.

It’s often seemed as if the worst thing about The Legend Of Zelda is… Zelda herself. Princess Zelda’s role has changed over the years, and from game to game, but despite getting more screentime than usual in Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom her characterisation in those games has been that of an ineffectual wimp – not helped by some unbearably whiny voice-acting.

Strangely, she had a lot more to do, and was far less reliant on Link, in much older titles such as Ocarina Of Time and The Wind Waker. As such, it’s one of the few failings of the modern games that the series’ titular character somehow now has less agency and chutzpah than Princess Peach.

To be fair, the nature of single-player video games makes it difficult to give supporting characters meaningful roles but that makes this, the first Nintendo-made title to feature Zelda as the protagonist (don’t ask about the non-Nintendo ones), all the more welcome. Not just because the character deserves the attention – or even that the co-director is a woman – but because Echoes Of Wisdom is a unique and interesting title in its own right.

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Since Zelda games aren’t exactly known for their storytelling, you’ll be unsurprised to find out that this does not feature any startling character insights or backstory revelations. She’s just a dutiful princess and, like Link in the regular games, you never actually hear any dialogue from her. Rather than the roles being reversed though, Link is specifically referred to as being mute – which seems a bit of a missed opportunity.

The game does have an interesting set-up though, with the opening scenes showing Link in a showdown with Ganon, who, in traditional fashion, has captured Zelda. Just as Link is about to triumph though the two rivals are swallowed by a mysterious rift and Link’s final act is to release Zelda, who is forced to make a run for it.

She quickly discovers that not only have rifts opened up all around Hyrule, but many people are returning as imposters, including her father who immediately orders for her to be arrested. In jail she meets up with a fairy-like creature called Tri, who gives her the Tri Rod, which has the never-explained ability to copy inanimate and animate objects and create multiple copies of them called echoes.

Your first echo is simply a table, but this proves useful right up to the end as, especially when you create multiple ones, you’re able to use it to climb onto higher surfaces. You then quickly get a bed, which is even more useful because you can make bridges out of them (or sleep on them to regain health), before later exploration reveals even more items, including trampolines, boulders, ice blocks, water blocks, a brazier, and a wind cannon.

All of these interact with each other and the world using a realistic physics engine, so boulders will sink in water, tables float, braziers can melt or set fire to things, and the water blocks can be stacked to create bridges or towers you can swim through. Many of the monsters have elemental or other special attacks, so they’re often used in puzzle solutions too.

There’re only around 30 inanimate objects but dozens of different monsters, which you only have to kill once for you to be able to make infinite copies of (each echo has a certain cost to materialise, so you can only have one powerful monster at a time, but you can make multiple copies of things like beds at once). The monsters will attack others on sight or you can target particular foes for them to concentrate on, although some echoes don’t seem to pay much attention to that instruction.

All of this is done within the context of a top-down traditional Zelda adventure, with the art style and graphics engine very clearly reused from 2019’s Link’s Awakening remake. The structure is similar too, although it’s much less linear, usually with a choice of one or two different dungeons to tackle in whatever order you want.

Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom – beds and trampolines are super useful (Nintendo)

You soon gain two additional skills, beyond just echoes, the first being the ability to bind Tri with any object, so you can move it around or use it to drag you. This is often used for puzzles, including pulling or moving distant objects, but it can also be used to hold monsters in place for your echoes to more easily attack them.

Zelda’s most useful role in combat is as a distraction and to hold enemies down while her allies pummel them. However, you can also transform into Link for a short period of time, by collecting energy tokens that are relatively plentiful in dungeons but not in the real world. We’re still not clear what’s supposed to be going on with this in story terms but the whole concept feels like a bit of a fudge.

The time limit is clearly so you don’t rely on direct combat too much but that’s a rather clumsy way of trying to influence the gameplay. It’s also a shame that it can make Zelda herself feel impotent. Even once she picks up a bow fairly early on, she has to turn into Link to use it, despite many previous games showing her to be proficient with the weapon (and, yes, this does seem to be a new, previously unvisited, timeline but that’s hardly a good reason not to let Zelda do the fighting herself).

Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom – there’s more side-on areas than Link’s Awakening (Nintendo)

To be honest, we would’ve got rid of the combat completely, as the game is already more puzzle-based than a normal Zelda and the best boss battles are the ones where you have to think outside of the box in terms of using bind and your echoes. Although everything always seems to have multiple solutions and it’s never clear if there’s even supposed to be one obvious one.

There’s one section in the Holy Mount Lanayru dungeon that requires so much thought and preparation, in terms of how you use a range of disparate echoes, that we’re still not sure if we were missing a simpler solution or not – but we don’t think so, because the rest of the dungeon is enjoyably hard too.

This is easily the best 2D Zelda game since 2013’s A Link Between Worlds and all the more so because although the map and structure is similar the nature of the puzzles and combat are very different. Zelda’s transformation into Link may be the weak leak in your armoury of abilities but the only major fault is the question of consistency.

As great as Holy Mount Lanayru and some of the other dungeons are, the Zora temple may be the worst Zelda dungeon ever: almost completely linear and with no substantial puzzles. Although it’s not clear exactly how the work has been divided up, the game’s co-developer is Grezzo and you do get the distinct impression that if this had been a solely in-house production then Nintendo would’ve been more consistent in their use of the game’s toolbox of mechanics.

Your mileage will vary over the art design (we don’t find it quite as cute as Nintendo seems to) but it’s certainly annoying that the game still has some minor frame rate issues. They’re not as bad as Link’s Awakening but why they exist at all is a mystery given how low tech the game is. The depth of field effect has also been toned down considerably from Grezzo’s previous game, although to the point where they probably should’ve just removed it entirely.

This is a longer adventure than the 14 or so hours of Link’s Awakening and there’s a good range of side quests and meaningful extras to search for. The map isn’t massive, but it has a good mix of elements from both the classic and modern games, that even manages to reconcile the different types of Zora designs over the years.

Echoes Of Wisdom certainly isn’t perfect but it is very good and its highs (including some excellent music – especially the Gerudo temple) are up there with the very best of the franchise. It was wise to give Zelda her own abilities, and not just make her Link in all but name, and the game is at its best when it leans into that.

Zelda deserves her own sub-franchise simply because she’s named dropped so often and yet rarely gets to do anything in the mainline games. But the echoes concept is interesting enough that it justifies the game purely on its gameplay merits. If there’s a follow-up we’d like to see it diverge even further from The Legend Of Zelda formula and let its titular character truly become her own person.

Formats: Nintendo Switch
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EPD and Grezzo
Release Date: 26th September 2024
Age Rating: 7

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