Hey, listen! It’s dangerous to go alone.
For almost 40 years, these same echoes of wisdom from the The Legend of Zelda universe have been rattling around our heads, powering memes, references in films and TV, and providing the drop for just the filthiest dubstep tracks known to man.
But The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom does something new for a main entry in the storied series, placing Princess Zelda in the lead role as the playable protagonist of a core entry for the first time – finally, Zelda is the princess and the hero.
However, some things about The Legend of Zelda never change. Fittingly, the first one you notice in Echoes of Wisdom is the iconic soundtrack, as an exceptional opening sequence perfectly showcases Nintendo’s ability to remix those classic motifs into something fresh, ethereal and atmospheric.
Then, as you’re booted out into a pint-sized, chibi version of Hyrule, you find a world that’s joyous and reactive, with an incredible variety of different things to collect. Chief among these is the central mechanic of the game, Echoes.
Using the power of her magical friend Tri, after touching an object or enemy in Hyrule, Zelda can summon a copy to use in puzzle-solving or combat. Ranging from mundane objects like pots and boxes, to trampolines and Minecraft-style disembodied cubes of water, my collection was into triple-figures by the end of my adventure, with tons of unique creatures and levelled variants to discover.
These Echoes, and the world they inhabit, are easily the strongest aspect of Echoes of Wisdom.
A lot of games claim you can ‘play your way’, but few actually give you the freedom to smoosh objects together in novel ways which actually feel like you’re arriving at a different solution than someone else. In Echoes of Wisdom, I feel like different players could genuinely default to different Echoes in battle: do you want to fire off waves of rolling armadillos from afar, hide behind a metal-clad knight, or run up and drop sea urchins on monsters’ heads as an ersatz melee build?
You can take this approach to puzzles as well, where, when you find yourself stranded on one side of a crevasse, you can engage with the ‘intended’ mechanics of an area or just stack beds on top of one another to build a bridge and trampoline off the end to clear the gap instead. Exploring to find new Echoes from exotic ends of the map can genuinely provide new solutions to problems you encounter, so it doesn’t feel rigid, and venturing off the beaten path is rewarded with more than just upgrade materials.
Despite being extremely condensed – you can make your way around the perimeter of the map in a few minutes – having all of the biomes and locations you’ve seen in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom accessible in a tiny open world format makes Echoes of Wisdom feel like a proper Zelda game, as do the shared UI elements where you select your Echoes from the same hot menu as you do weapons and Zonai Devices in Tears of the Kingdom (I am aware this is the most Nintendo Tax praise and many games would be criticised for having the same UI).
But unfortunately, while the toy-chest art direction of Echoes of Wisdom is charming in its own right, the game has some rough edges that aren’t befitting of a main series entry into a flagship franchise like The Legend of Zelda – with the Switch, now wrinkled and doddery like Lady Impa, beginning to look its age.
Some of the environmental textures are muddy, blurry or look undetailed. The lines of the characters and other assets aren’t crisp. Then, in scene transitions and when there are a lot of moving parts on-screen, the frame rate gets choppy and the game slows down.
So, while there are many impressive aspects of exploring Echoes of Wisdom, it’s not a totally mind-blowing experience. There’s a lot that looks sweet, or cosy, or cute, but not a lot of ‘wow’.
That’s not to say that Echoes of Wisdom is incapable of spectacle – the establishing cutscenes that introduce different areas are lovely, and climactic story beats have the necessary punch – but Link’s Awakening, 5 years ago, looked exciting in a way Echoes of Wisdom doesn’t.
And, because it’s made out of the same framework as Link’s Awakening, there are a few other borrowed parts in Echoes of Wisdom that don’t work quite as well, too.
Where Link is the archetypal silent protagonist, I don’t think casting Zelda as a mute main character (who literally talks to other people but just doesn’t have any dialogue) makes as much sense. Which means that while the story as a whole is good, it’s also a little one-paced, and that results in the latter half feeling padded in comparison to the first few main quests, as you tackle a lot of similar dungeons in rapid succession.
Like I said, the puzzle-solving in these dungeons is great and feels very organic, but some of these later dungeons also introduce frustrating mechanics – like insta-fail stealth sections or gusts of hot air that don’t seem to send you as high as they should – which exacerbates the issue.
Echoes of Wisdom’s bosses will also be divisive. I won’t spoil their theming or what you need to do to beat them, but there is very much a way to beat them, that isn’t well sign-posted. In a game where you’ve been encouraged to use every aspect of your toolkit to overcome obstacles, to have to pack that in and use a specific power for just bosses can be jarring.
But with all of that said, Echoes of Wisdom is streamlined and breezy enough that these foibles don’t vastly outstay their welcome. The game’s not small – clocking in at a similar length to Link’s Awakening at about 15-20 hours – but it never feels overwhelmingly huge.
Really, Echoes of Wisdom feels like the perfect sign-off for the Switch with new hardware reportedly on the horizon. It’s a colourful, accessible epic that pushes its console to the limit, with all of the mechanical depth and invention, artistic design, whimsy, and spirit of adventure that you expect from a first-party Nintendo adventure.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom arrives for Nintendo Switch on September 26. This review was written with code provided by the publisher on a Nintendo Switch OLED.
