Enough talk about that gay and Satanic Dragon Age game, let's give an actually GOOD video game some attention:

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Writeup part 1/6

Right away, there’s two things you ought to know about Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the first Zelda game on a Nintendo console where the eponymous princess is actually the main hero.

First of all, this is NOT some Feminist hijacking of a long-established franchise, but instead a natural experiment for the series to try out, given how princess Zelda has steadily gained popularity and prominence over the years, and has always had a lot of potential as a protagonist (ever since Ocarina of Time, Zelda has been established as a formidable magic caster and Triforce wielder, as well as surprisingly athletic), who’s been implied to have had plenty of off-screen adventures of her own over the years. This is after all a girl who in her various incarnations has been both a Ninja AND a Pirate, and who in Breath of the Wild stalemated Calamity Ganon for 100 straight years.

I’m quite confident in this charitable assessment for multiple reasons: for starters, the way Link is treated, despite him being sidelined early on, is nothing but respectful and appreciative. During the first 5 minutes of EoW, Link displays more heroism and badassery than the likes of Nu Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones showed over the course of entire 2-3 hour movies, successfully storming the enemy stronghold, defeating Ganon and crucially, Rescuing Zelda. While this version of Link hadn’t been into contact with the royal family until this point, he’s already well-established as Hyrule’s greatest hero among the common folk, and throughout EoW you’ll frequently hear tales about the Link’s achievements and about the people he heroically saved. Ganon getting the drop on Link through underhanded means and managing to capture him doesn’t really diminish Link as a hero – and hell, plenty of other Nintendo heroes have historically found themselves in similar positions, with Donkey Kong having to be rescued back in 1995 by Diddy and his girlfriend Dixie, and Mario having to be saved by Luigi multiple times over the years.

Moreover, despite taking over as the main character in this game, Zelda in no way serves as a straightforward Link Replacement. In fact, her unique moveset only serves to underscore her femininity. You see, EoW Zelda is not a physical fighter, but a Summoner (with the hero title of Priestess), who can copy objects and monsters with a staff granted to her by your new fairy companion Tri, and then summon Echoes of them at will. Of course, expecting long-time LoZ fans to play as a pure Summoner throughout the entire adventure would be something of a big ask, and so Zelda does later on get the ability to temporarily take on a Swordfighter Form, which does give her access to a basic Link moveset. However, this requires Zelda having access to Link’s discarded weapons (which themselves seems to possess a Memory of Link’s fighting style) AND being powered up by a special transdimensional energy source. If anything, the fact that being able to fight like Vanilla Link constitutes a time-limited Super Mode for Zelda just goes to show how special Link is

There ARE certain other culture war issues where this game fares kinda badly (I’ll get to that during the Based Morality section of this writeup), but feminism/battle of the sexes issues are not among them.

The second thing that’s important to note is that despite the different main character, Echoes of Wisdom is no cutesy throwaway spinoff, but a full-blown mainline 2D Zelda game, and in my opinion, one of the best. This is no Four Swords Adventure or Triforce Heroes, this game is arguably more of a true LoZ experience than Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. Moreover, EoW is the first new top-down Zelda game since 2013’s A Link Between Worlds – and the first original top-down Zelda game *with an entirely original, traditional overworld* since Minish Cap, which came out 20 years ago.

So even beyond its headline-grabbing change of main character, EoW is something of a landmark series entry, not only being the first post-BotW 2D Zelda, but also the first truly modern 2D Zelda, period, for better or worse. Thankfully, it’s mostly the former, because this game strikes a much better balance between the classic Zelda formula and the Switch-era open world design than I’d ever have expected. Indeed, EoW very much feels like the missing link (heh) between ALBW (which was a traditional Zelda game that made a big deal about letting you tackle two set of temples in the order of your choosing) and the almost entirely non-linear BotW, where you could take on the final boss 10 minutes after taking your first steps on the overworld. But at the end of the day, EoW sticks much closer to ALBW’s slightly modified take on the traditional Zelda formula than BotW’s radical departure – and it’s all the better for it!

2/6

Finally we have an original Zelda game on the Switch with proper dungeons, actual overworld music, and a story that isn’t mostly made up of optional flashbacks. Furthermore, you don’t get all of your core moveset handed out to you in the tutorial area (greatly crippling the sense of progression), but gradually useful abilities as you progress through the story. Playing Skyward Sword HD back in 2021 already reminded me of just how much I missed the traditional Zelda formula and made SS feel surprisingly fresh in a post-BotW world, so you can imagine just how much I welcome a brand new (mostly) traditional Zelda adventure in 2024, after TotK doubled down on open world extremism.

I personally consider the core Zelda formula, with its finely-tuned balance between exploration, NPC interactions, sidequests, mini-games, puzzles, dungeons/temples, combat and boss fights, to be the best in all of gaming, especially when further bolstered by great soundtracks, fun stories and compelling characters. Many of these elements are of course still present in BotW and TotK, and often the best they’ve ever been (hence why I still consider BotW 1 & 2 amazing games overall), but their HORRIBLE handling of music and storytelling, as well as their massively nerfed dungeons, mean that they can never be truly elite Zelda games in my eyes.

EoW meanwhile, while not reaching the stratospheric highs of its 3D Switch counterparts, does an infinitely better job of making its world open, and giving the player more of a choice of how to tackle the adventure, WITHOUT in the process sacrificing much of what made Zelda games great ever since A Link to the Past. So in many ways this game really is the best of both worlds, especially since it’s a real step up from most past 2D Zelda games in terms of size, ambition, storytelling and the like.

Like the open world Zelda games, EoW emphasizes exploration and experimentation, while boasting a huge world filled with tons of collectables and secrets – but even so, while the game is absolutely massive and packed with content compared to past 2D Zelda games, it’s remarkably compact when placed next to the 3D Switch games. Basically, EoW’s overworld feels like a shrunk down version of the BotW Hyrule, not a padded out version of, say, ALttP’s overworld. Its map is apparently 8 times the size of Koholint Island from Link’s Awakening, and yet wherever I turned, I kept uncovering treasure chests, hidden goodies and even new caves, making exploration constantly rewarding.

Hell, in some ways EoW is straight up superior to its 3D counterparts as an open world game; one thing I always felt that BotW needed to fully justify its open world approach was Optional Temples, full-blown Zelda dungeons that you can just stumble upon in the overworld. Just imagine the sense of discovery and excitement, what an amazing surprise something like that would be! TotK *almost* did this, as at one point I really did think I’d come across just such a secret temple while exploring The Depths, but no, turns out it was a story-relevant dungeon that I could only unlock after fulfilling various story quest requirements.

However, in EoW I really did at one point unexpectedly come across something that turned out to be a mini-dungeon, with a wholly original Boss battle! Sure, it still wasn’t a full dungeon, but it was closer to what I’d been wanting than anything in BotW or its sequel. Moreover, the game actually features multiple such optional mini-dungeons capped off by full-blown boss fights, even if the bosses tend to be recycled reskins from story dungeons.

Another thing EoW does better than TotK and ESPECIALLY BotW is enemy variety. While the monster selection in BotW was infamously bad, princess Zelda’s big adventure boasts a wonderful selection of baddies taken from all sorts of past Zelda games, tickling your nostalgia bone in addition to providing each major region with plenty of unique monsters. The game will even sometimes hide away rare, powerful monsters in out-of-the-way areas, similar to what Pokemon Legends: Arceus sometimes does with rare Pokemon, and since defeating a monster means you from now on become able to summon Echoes of it at will, this ends up being a brilliant way to reward exploration.

3/6

As far as 2D Zelda worlds go, EoW’s Hyrule stands out not just because of its size, but also because of its huge number of towns and civilizations: not only do Gorons, the Gerudo and the Zoras all have unique towns, but you actually get TWO different Zora towns, one for Sea Zoras (the graceful, elf-like Zoras we know from the 3D games) and the other for River Zoras, the more monstrous and bulky type of Zora that have a long history of being hostile monsters in 2D Zelda games, but here they are just as friendly as their sea counterparts. Moreover, for the first time in 20 years Deku Scrubs are back in a mainline Zelda game, and hell, even the Yeti race from Twilight Princess returns for only its second Zelda appearance.

While the towns in EoW are generally pretty small, they do offer quite a few sidequests, and even incentivize you to return to them from time to time, either due to being connected to other sidequests, or because of new sidequests opening up as you advance the story. A lot of the sidequests are quite simple and easy, but still satisfying, and a nice change of pace from the story campaign and regular exploration.

One unique aspect of EoW’s world is the Rifts that have opened up all over Hyrule, swallowing up people, objects and large landmasses, and rendering various areas inaccessible. Once you enter a Rift however, you’ll discover a bizarre parallel dimension where time is frozen and everything that was absorbed in an area has been scattered around. Link and Zelda are the only people actually able to move around inside Rifts, for reasons that should be pretty obvious if you know your LoZ lore.

Patching up Rifts and freeing the people trapped within them is a notable part of the game, and usually involves you exploring a Rift area to find and free the friends of your companion character Tri, who have the power return things back to normal. Some people might consider these sections of the game to be Filler, but I found them enjoyable enough: the Rift areas themselves are delightfully surreal (they remind me of Pokemon Platinum’s Distortion World, if not quite as cool), and you can traverse them in some pretty nifty ways, for example by using floating trees as platforms. It definitely spices up an otherwise pretty Vanilla LoZ world. These segments are also pretty short, not overstaying their welcome and thereby essentially being a much better version of something like the Tears of Light segments in Twilight Princess. There are also various optional Rifts you can tackle, which give you good enough rewards to make them genuinely worthwhile.

The aspect of EoW that I’m on the fence about is however the game’s signature mechanic of Copying objects or monsters and summoning Echoes. On the one hand, this is a really unique and creative idea, and does a great job differentiating Zelda from Link. However, both in terms of combat and puzzles, it comes with clear downsides. In terms of combat, the problems should be obvious: It’s just plain more fun to fight an enemy yourself than have an NPC do it for you, and yet the latter is generally a far superior strategy than, say, throwing rocks at enemies (one notable way Zelda herself can damage them). Moreover, your summoned Echo can sometimes be slow to attack, so dealing with multiple enemies at the same time (even if they’re really weak), just becomes so much slower and more cumbersome than it would have been when playing as Link.

Or at least, that’s how I initially felt, because it turns out that the Echo system was handled way better than I initially gave it credit for: for starters, you can from early on summon multiple weaker enemies yourself to do crowd control, as well as repeatedly summoning and re-summoning strong monsters with long cooldowns after their initial attacks, effectively bypassing that weakness (since the Echo attacks almost immediately after first being summoned) while also making yourself a more active participant in combat. Later on you also become able to use Tri’s power to hold an enemy in place so that your Echo can freely attack it – or actively push it into harm’s way, or even drop it down bottomless pits depending on the location. Eventually you also become able to create various automatons that can be deployed alongside regular Echoes for even more DPS firepower. And of course, there’s your time-limited Super Mode, which eventually gains more of Link’s classic abilities than just his sword.

And these various options to increase player participation in battles come in addition to the clear *benefits* of the Echo system, which are actually quite substantial. For starters, it turns Echoes of Wisdom’s EXCELLENT enemy variety into an enormous asset, because every new regular monster (as well as some midbosses) you defeat effectively becomes a new Weapon for you to try out, and as there are so many of them new life just keeps getting injected into the combat system – which also becomes more and more fun as the game progresses, because you gain access to stronger and stronger monsters, at a far more rapid rate than Link would have been able to upgrade his weapons in a regular Zelda game. Moreover, the game does a great job balancing your Echoes; sure, a massive, powerful and durable Echo sounds great, but is it actually better than 5 (!) weaker monsters being deployed simultaneously, with various situationally useful abilities or effects? The varying cost of Echoes, as well as the hard limit to how much summoning energy you can expend, does a surprisingly good job of balancing the 100+ Echoes, and over the course of the game I ended up successfully utilizing and finding valid uses for many dozen different monsters in combat.