For the first time, Princess Zelda takes on the mantle of hero. — Photos: Nintendo
The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom finds us once again in the imperiled medieval fantasy world of Hyrule. This time, a mysterious force has been creating disastrous rifts that suck buildings and people alike into a dark and mysterious void.
You start by fighting through a dungeon as Link, the protagonist of every previous Legend Of Zelda game, but your time with him is brief.
For the first time, Princess Zelda takes on the mantle of hero.
Working with a diminutive yellow orb named Tri, Zelda sets out to repair the many rifts across the game’s midsize open world and to restore Hyrule to its previous idyll. How she accomplishes this task is what makes Echoes Of Wisdom special.
Tri gifts Zelda with a magic wand that allows her to manipulate the environment in various ways. Not only can she grab distant objects and move them around – a mechanic familiar to those who have played recent Legend Of Zelda titles like Breath Of The Wild or Tears Of The Kingdom – she can also make an echo, or copy, of nearly everything in the game’s world.
Whether it’s a shrub or a clay pot, a block of ice, a plushly quilted bed or a sword-swinging Moblin, little lies beyond the reach of Zelda’s copy-pasting powers. It’s endlessly fun.
Instead of the familiar sword-and-shield gameplay that defines the franchise, Zelda can bring a bevy of creative solutions to encounters with enemies. She can throw a murder of crows at them; freeze them with an Ice Keese; set fire to the environment with a crawling Torch Slug; or simply pick the offending monster up with the wand’s tractor beam and drop it off the nearest cliff.
Working with a diminutive yellow orb named Tri, Zelda sets out to repair the many rifts across the game’s midsize open world and to restore Hyrule to its previous idyll.
The magic also makes for fascinating and inventive solutions to the game’s many environmental puzzles. You can use stomping blocks as stepping stones to reach higher platforms. You can extend liquid bridges across chasms or choose to be carried over on a Flying Tile. You can stack up a pile of beds until you’ve made a very ugly, if perfectly functional, stairway. It’s powerful magic that makes for refreshing gameplay.
Each area provides fresh monsters and environments, including cold zones with meltable walls and underwater areas with swift currents to navigate, that you may employ your smorgasbord of echoes against. The game’s default level of difficulty is forgiving, and gives you plenty of space to experiment before finding a solution that clicks in an interesting or downright goofy way.
Although Zelda is given access to Link’s weapons over the course of the game, it’s often far more entertaining to spawn in monsters or environmental features and discover what kind of surprising effects they may have.
Tri and its globular allies employ a similar magic on a much grander scale. They can bring whole castles, town squares, temples and lakes back from the void known as the Stilled World, and return them whole cloth to their original sites. It’s a strange effect. Doubly so thanks to the top-down, toy-ified aesthetic of Echoes Of Wisdom, whose round-cornered, zoomed-in diorama look was established by the 2019 remake of Link’s Awakening.
Everything in Echoes Of Wisdom fits precisely on its own tile, with a predetermined depth and height. In one of the early rift-healing sequences, you watch as an ally of Tri plops down a cookie-cutter tree on the right side of a house and floats offscreen only to immediately return and blink out of nothingness a perfectly symmetrical twin on the house’s opposite side. It feels like watching a developer build out a section of the map in real time.
Echoes of Wisdom uses Hyrule as a platform upon which to experiment and explore, and it’s quite successful in this respect.
Everything is seemingly interchangeable, everything is seemingly an echo of an echo. And that gives the impression that very little in the world actually has any substance or bespoke meaning. Since Zelda can zap and hoover up nearly everything, it becomes confusing at times knowing which objects are real and which are the temporary echoes.
This confusion fits with the approach Nintendo has always taken with its Legend Of Zelda games, which, unlike its Mario or Metroid series, are less a linear narrative with plot beats than an endless retelling of the same heroic journey using relatively blank-slate characters.
The games try, through their text, to sell themselves as mythological stories, slotting their main characters into fate-determined archetypes: the hero and the priestess of legend. The actual details of the plot are largely arbitrary and unimportant. The same sorts of monsters, the same villages, the same side characters dutifully making an appearance before trotting away. When King Rhoam enters, I recognise his character from Breath Of The Wild. He feels unspecific to Echoes Of Wisdom, more a token that moves the plot forward than Zelda’s father with personal motivations.
Echoes Of Wisdom muddles things even further by inserting the question of whether these characters are real or false echoes; in the story, they often appear as impostors masquerading as the originals.
There’s a certain irony here in light of how aggressively Nintendo pursues cases of copyright infringement. It has a long history of sending takedown notices to makers of fan-made games and recently filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the developers of Palworld, whose characters and mechanics resemble ones from the Pokémon franchise.
When it comes to the characters and mythology underlying its worlds, Nintendo maintains a remarkably iron grip. But within that protected space, it tends to provide players with a surprisingly flexible and experimental sandbox.
When it comes to the characters and mythology underlying its worlds, Nintendo maintains a remarkably iron grip. But within that protected space, it tends to provide players with a surprisingly flexible and experimental sandbox. How precious, after all, can Nintendo be about the lore of The Legend Of Zelda when, in Echoes Of Wisdom, you can plop down a bed right in the middle of a pitched battle and take a power nap to regain your lost hearts? Or spawn a flaming brazier next to a living snowman, sit back and observe the macabre spectacle of it melting into a puddle?
Other long-running series such as Final Fantasy reset their stories in each incarnation, but they each feature new characters with specific relationships to their unique worlds. With Zelda, you get the same Hyrule, the same Kakariko Village nestled under Eldin Volcano, the same Mount Lanayru, the same sandstorm-swept Gerudo Desert. There is just enough specificity to feel familiar and untouchable at the same time.
Echoes Of Wisdom uses Hyrule as a platform upon which to experiment and explore, and it’s quite successful in this respect. But this Hyrule is not a place that lets me emotionally connect to its characters, or see them as anything more than elaborate toys to pick up and plunk around.
While piloting my own tiny Zelda, who dons adorable outfits and spins elegantly, swinging her ponytail about in a flourish, I have fun reenacting the storied myth. This time there are some spooky twists and existential turns as beloved figures are drained of colour and life before her eyes and drawn into the malevolent Stilled World.
I can’t help but wonder, though, what Echoes Of Wisdom might look like if it took the same experimental ethos in its gameplay and applied it to its iconic characters. Nintendo would do well to rescue them from the timeless void of its immobile legacy, not to be employed as flat archetypes, but as real, living characters who might better stand apart from decades of history. – The New York Times
