The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Review — Copy + Princess

Will Zelda break out in her debut titular role, or will it feel like a mere copy? Find out in our Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Review!

With the success of BotW back in 2017, Nintendo found that giving the player more agency had the makings of a winning formula. Six years later TotK demonstrated that limits can be a good thing when it comes to this freedom, with a range of new mechanics that could feel overwhelming despite still being well made.  The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom feels like the perfect medium here, with all the freedom afforded to you in other recent Zelda titles fine-tuned to match the stellar world you wander through.

After being narrowly rescued by Link, the titular princess leaves Ganon’s dungeon to find the world of Hyrule being swallowed by void-like rifts. Together with a new floating companion, Tri, she sets off to discover the truth behind the rifts and save her kingdom. It’s a nice twist on the typical Zelda formula without feeling too unfamiliar, a detail that is echoed throughout every facet of the game.

The game’s engaging narrative is told in three acts, introducing a new villain part of the way through the story. With Ganon being the de facto antagonist of Hyrule for so long, I was excited to see a new, mysterious evil-doer step into the role. Which makes it more disappointing when Echoes underutilizes them for most of the game. Still, the story, whilst formulaic, serves its purpose well and is kept engaging throughout.

Harkening back to the winning design in both open-world Zelda titles, Echoes of Wisdom shares a certain encouragement for player creativity. While keeping the familiar dungeon look and feel, Echoes hands you a Swiss army knife of potential key items and leaves you to tinker by yourself.

Much like Tears of the Kingdom, the most limiting factor in the game was my lack of imagination when approaching puzzles. However, Echoes’ approach to this level of player agency is slightly (but significantly) different. Instead of handing you raw materials and telling you to invent tools, it has taken that step for you and still trusted you enough to use them how you see fit.

Early on, you’ll be limited in what you can do with the Echoes you’re given. Represented by small floating triangles that trail behind Tri, each monster and item has a set cost value to summon it. This forces the player to get creative when first traversing through Hyrule; only being able to stack three beds, for example, before spawning another makes the first disappear.

The other main ability Zelda has is the ability to hold an item or mob in place, like a sort of telekinetic beam. While sounding a little overpowered, I found that all these mechanics were balanced and fair while extremely fun to play around with. Combat became a sort of Pokémon battle, summoning a Sword Moblin to defeat some Zols or a spiked roller to blitz a group of Lizalfos.

While Echoes are bountiful, I found that after an hour or so, I had found the handful of items that would get me through the rest of the game. Unfortunately, without the ability to mark ‘favourites’, I had to scroll through an endless list of items I’d have no intention of using before landing on the one I wanted.

Lastly, using her magic meter, Zelda can transform herself into an Echo of Link. While a nice way of speeding up or reducing the difficulty during fights, I constantly felt like it betrayed the essence of Echoes. With the magic bar depleting quickly, it’s a very powerful albeit costly ability and comes off as an insecure move that minimizes Zelda’s new playstyle.

This is felt the strongest during the boss fights throughout the game. While Echoes are able to help you stun each big bad, the killing blow is almost always achieved by transforming into Link and spamming his sword, lest you want to be fighting forever. I was begging to see more bosses tailored to Zelda’s specific skill set, but it rarely came to pass. Fortunately, the dungeons leading up to these big battles are quite the opposite, with satisfying and thought-provoking puzzles that require Zelda’s full library of abilities.

Along with the main story content, there are plenty of things to do around Hyrule whilst getting around to saving it. Along with seeking out heart pieces and might crystals, the latter allowing you to upgrade your Link-form and magic bar, there are a total of 50 side quests to do around the land. These range from finding a certain echo and presenting it to an NPC, fetch quests, and the like. Apart from a handful of these quests, I found them to all be repetitive and unrewarding. In a way that felt jammed into this new “Still World”, many side quests would start interesting enough but quickly be reduced to “jump into this rift and find 3-5 glowing orbs”. Most tasks will reward you with more might crystals or smoothie ingredients, items that tended to collect dust in my inventory towards the end of the game.

Echoes of Wisdom shares its look with the Link’s Awakening remake from 2019, being a direct sequel to that game and all. This visually distinct plastic rendition of the world and its characters transfers brilliantly in the Switch’s handheld mode, making characters and surroundings easy to distinguish on the smaller screen. Unfortunately, the game regularly suffers from framerate issues when travelling around Hyrule, a common theme among games late into the Switch’s lifespan.

As expected, the The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom OST is an instant classic with revamped versions of classic themes accompanied by new tunes like Tri’s new theme and a wonderful switch-up of Zelda’s Lullaby in the Main Theme for the game.