The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG

Players: 1

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

After the incredible creative juggernaut that was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, many wondered how the series could possibly top itself after that. Seen by many as one of the greatest games of all time, it seemed to manage the impossible by being a game that actually seemed bigger and more ambitious than The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, also hailed as one of the greatest games of all time. Surely Nintendo couldn’t manage to top themselves yet again, a third time in a row?

Rather than attempting to do so with their next attempt, Nintendo and co-developer Grezzo opted for a different approach, creating a sequel in the “2D Zelda” sub-series of Top-Down Action-RPG games with the same sort of creative spirit as Tears of the Kingdom. This sub-series was most recently seen on the Nintendo Switch in the form of a remake of the beloved Game Boy Game, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, and it appears that game’s toy-like style has been replicated here, making this seem in some ways like a direct sequel to that title.

Then there’s the other major factor here, the fact that after nearly forty years, this is the first mainline Zelda game that actually has you primarily in the role of Zelda herself. Rather than just being the same gameplay with Zelda swapped in for series protagonist Link. By contrast, Zelda cannot ordinarily attack enemies, but must instead rely on this game’s new core ability, the Tri Rod and its ability to create “echoes” of objects and enemies she finds throughout her adventure.

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Echo Fighter

On a fairly frequent basis, Zelda will come across objects in the world that are sparkling, indicating that players can walk up to them and add them to a growing list of “echoes” they can summon at any time from that point forth. These echoes act as a copy of the original object, and each has a casting cost associated with it, with the number of objects you can have on-screen limited by this casting cost, which grows over the course of the game.

Players will start out with a table that Zelda can climb on to get to higher platforms, but will soon also get a bed that can be used as a staircase or slept in to refill health, a clay pot that can be thrown at enemies, and a boulder that can be used to block paths to keep enemies from following or escaping. As you progress through the game, you’ll encounter even more objects, and part of the fun is thinking up ways they can be useful.

However, it’s not just items Zelda can create. Every non-boss enemy Zelda defeats can be copied as well, and this is the primary way you’ll engage enemies in combat. This cleverly makes every enemy encounter into a puzzle unto itself, figuring out which of the enemies you’ve already defeated is going to be the most useful for taking down a new foe. For many enemies, the bat-like keese are a good choice, as they have a low casting cost so you can often swarm enemies with a barrage of them. However, a well-defended enemy might be more vulnerable to the firey ignizol, and particularly tough enemies might go down faster if you use the tough armored darknut. As you go farther in the game, you’ll have to think about how to even damage some enemies. What do you do to counter an enemy who’s underwater? An enemy that burrows under sand? An enemy that’s super-fast?

That’s when this new combat system is at its best. At its worst, this can get tedious, trying to get a particularly stubborn enemy to go down when their defenses seem more than a match for everything you throw at them. And even if you can deal damage, it can sometimes feel like slowly chipping away at them – I mentioned before that keese are often a great go-to solution for combat, but they don’t do much damage.

In these situations, you may decide to use one of Zelda’s other abilities. Not too long into the game, you get the ability to use the tri rod to hold in place any enemy and move them relative to where you are. Soon after this, you gain the ability to temporarily transform into a magical, superpowered version of Link, something that comes handy when you need to deal a finishing blow to a boss, or just want to make short work of an irritating enemy.

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Echoes in the Dungeon

The echoes system does also make for a delightful reinterpretation of dungeons, which are in many ways closer to the more traditional Zelda dungeons of past games than what we’ve seen in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. However, rather than getting some new item halfway through a dungeon that will help you solve puzzles and best the dungeon’s boss, you’ll encounter multiple new enemies to add to your list of echoes, not only giving you a wealth of new abilities rather than just one, but also meaning that you need to be even more thoughtful about which of those abilities you need to solve said puzzles and defeat said boss.

To this end, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has some delightfully clever puzzles and some very well-crafted boss fights, really making you think about the abilities you have available to you. As the game progresses, this list of abilities becomes exponentially more formidable, sometimes even giving you multiple ways to take on a particular challenge. However, this also means you sometimes need to be even more observant to pick out which enemy or item in the list of dozens will help you out.

For one example, on one particular puzzle, I was confronted with a tower I needed to climb that was beyond my ability to bed-stack my way to the top, it was just too tall. I kept trying all sorts of things to try to climb the tower with no luck. Ultimately, I found a nearby ledge to jump from, and glided by holding onto a bird I had copied much earlier. I was a little frustrated with this, feeling like the game would have set me up to fail if I hadn’t copied the bird, when I realized I could have copied another nearby enemy and stood on it as it went about its usual pattern of lifting high up into the air. Oops. Still, the game’s flexibility enabled me to find another solution on my own, and I have to give the game credit for that.

To that end, I should probably address the comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Echoes of Wisdom does give players the tools to come up with some really creative puzzle solutions, but make no mistake – this is nothing compared to the awe-inspiring flexibility of Tears of the Kingdom’s Ultrahand ability. It’s not even close. However, that’s okay – Echoes of Wisdom’s… er, echoes… are different and unique enough, and the game’s puzzles are so well-crafted in a way that is built around them, that it still succeeds brilliantly in its own right.

Before I forget, I should take a moment to talk about this game’s presentation, and as noted before, it draws heavily from the overall look of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake, using the same simplified cutesy character designs that look almost like plastic Playmobil figurines. However, this is not to say that this game is anything other than visually gorgeous, with detailed 3D visuals with outstanding lighting and a lot of little animations in the environment that really make the game come alive.

However, as many have feared, this does come with its own problems. Namely, the framerates really do chug at times here, and it certainly feels like we’ve reached the limit of the Nintendo Switch’s power if a relatively simple Top-Down Zelda game can bring the console to its knees, performance-wise. These performance issues don’t greatly affect the gameplay, but they are certainly distracting, all the same.

When it comes to the soundtrack, Echoes of Wisdom’s instrumental music sounds pretty similar to the style we previously saw in the Link’s Awakening remake, although this game features a new selection of themes, some of them pretty catchy. Highlights include Hyrule Castle Town, Hyrule Castle, South Village, Gerudo Town, Desert Boss, Zora Town Sea, Seariver Boss, Dungeon Jungle, and I really liked the standard Field Theme and the Dungeon Desert theme. Overall, this is a solid soundtrack, though I wouldn’t list it among the best soundtracks the series has ever had.

Before I forget, I need to mention that beyond the performance issues and the occasionally tedious combat, there is one other frustration I need to bring up. The way this game handles selecting your echo is almost identical to the way you select weapons and inventory items in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which is to say it’s terrible. If you want to select one particular echo, you’ll need to sift through the entire list of them, sorted left to right single-file. You can change the way it’s sorted (last used, most-used, order received, etc.), but you can’t perform a search for a specific echo, nor can you “favorite” echoes so they’re always close at hand.

Still, while The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is not as ambitious and groundbreaking as Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and it has its fair share of issues, overall this is still a brilliant, must-have game that does a wonderful job recontextualizing the Legend of Zelda formula to work with an entirely different protagonist with a different skill set, with some truly inspired puzzle design and boss design to go along with it. Do not miss this game.

tl;dr – The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a Top-Down Action-RPG that combines elements of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to make for something that’s truly unique and wonderful within the series, befitting Zelda’s first mainline adventure as the main protagonist. The new echo mechanic, while not quite as groundbreaking as Tears’ Ultrahand, is still inspired, and the puzzle design and boss design is phenomenal. This may not be quite at the same level as Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, but it is still an absolute must-play game.

Grade: A

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Winner:

Game of the Year: Silver Award (Second Place) – While nowhere near as massive and ambitious as last year’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Echoes of Wisdom is still bursting with creativity, taking the spirit of Tears of the Kingdom and applying it to Nintendo’s smaller, 2D Zelda formula, resulting in something truly wonderful in its own right. And it’s fitting that after waiting decades to appear in the game as its protagonist, Princess Zelda finally takes the lead not as a pandering marketing move, but because the game designers at Nintendo and Grezzo came to the realization that the gameplay they were working on was better-suited to Zelda than Link. Let’s hope this isn’t the last we see of Zelda taking a more active role in her own game series.

Best Action-RPG – Action-RPGs tend to reward exploration and taking on major enemies by granting some new piece of equipment or new ability, and Echoes of Wisdom’s echo mechanic takes this concept and turns it on its head, by literally making your reward the enemy themselves, or a piece of that place you just got to. This has the brilliant result of making it all the more sweet whenever you take out a really tough enemy, because that new enemy is now a part of your move set. This inspired mechanic is a large part of what makes The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom the clear choice when it comes to this genre in 2024.

Runner-Up: Best Sequel, Best Music, Best Song – Hyrule Field Theme by Hajime Wakai

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

One of the initial batch of games to receive free updates on Nintendo Switch 2 when it launched in 2025, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is much like its predecessor The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening in that it isn’t the sort of game that felt like it should have needed an update. Using the same visual style as the Nintendo Switch remake of Link’s Awakening, this is yet again not a technically-demanding game, and in the years since the previous game released, surely they would have tracked down the issues causing framerate problems in that game? Sadly, this appears not to be the case, since this game once again has noticeable framerate drops in places.

Oddly, the Nintendo Switch update purportedly wasn’t even about addressing those framerate issues, but improving the resolution and adding HDR support. I can’t really vouch for any difference these improvements made – the game looks nice, but it always looked nice. However, even if this update wasn’t meant to improve the framerate, I suppose just being on Nintendo Switch 2 was enough to fix this particular issue, because I didn’t notice any framerate problems.

So there it is – the biggest issue The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom had with its performance has been resolved on Nintendo Switch 2, even if it wasn’t the patch that fixed things. And while I wouldn’t say that this transforms the game, it certainly does make this the best way to play it.

tl;dr – The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a Top-Down Action-RPG that combines elements of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to make for something that’s truly unique and wonderful within the series, befitting Zelda’s first mainline adventure as the main protagonist. The new echo mechanic, while not quite as groundbreaking as Tears’ Ultrahand, is still inspired, and the puzzle design and boss design is phenomenal. This may not be quite at the same level as Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, but it is still an absolute must-play game, and it plays even better on Nintendo Switch 2, without the framerate issues it was noted to have on Nintendo Switch. Definitely worth a look!

Grade: A

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