The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Switch)

In The Legend of Zelda series, three goddesses bless the land of Hyrule with the Triforce. Split into three pieces, the Triforce empowers those who represent its virtues best. The Triforce of Power usually ends up in the hands of evil, the diabolical Ganon often acquiring it as part of his bid to conquer the realm. The Triforce of Courage, as a result, often goes to a brave hero who stands up to Ganon, the many incarnations of Link across time usually the ones to receive it. The last piece, the Triforce of Wisdom, almost always goes to the Princess Zelda, but the poor princess has rarely had a chance to show her wisdom when she quite often ends up the damsel in distress. Putting Zelda in the lead role does give a chance for her to show the kind of intelligence that would earn her a goddess’s favor, but Link has already been seen solving many a puzzle across the series. For The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Princess Zelda would have to do something bigger to truly show why she is most deserving of that Triforce piece, and the game comes up with a pretty clever puzzle solving tool for that in the form of Echoes.

Zelda is not naturally a fighter here, the princess of Hyrule instead relying on a magical tool known as the Tri Rod as she ends up being the one who needs to save the kingdom this go around. The Tri Rod’s main unique function is its ability to copy certain objects and enemies, Zelda then able to call upon them any time later as Echoes. In this top-down adventure game, Zelda will find herself clearing out dungeons, traveling to new lands, and solving a litany of puzzles, all of these enhanced by the ever-increasing scope of Echoes she acquires as each new location can lead to new opportunities. Even early on your Echoes show themselves to be quite flexible. Copying a bed might not seem too useful in puzzle solving, but since Zelda can summon multiple Echoes at once, she can build a small staircase of beds to reach heights she otherwise couldn’t. During the game’s perhaps too abundant stealth sections, she can make and then shatter a pot to distract a guard, or even just build herself a way up and over the patrols. If she needs to block powerful winds, cross water, or start fires, Zelda will eventually have a collection of options for overcoming these obstacles, and rather wisely, the game also makes sure some simpler tasks aren’t too difficult to overcome. After a while, if you want to get somewhere high up, you will have some high end Echoes that make climbing a breeze, or you can even start to explore the depths of the most plentiful type of echo you will come across: enemies.

Most every standard enemy in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom can end up joining your side so long as you beat one and then claim the echo it leaves behind. At first, you might think these are only useful in battle, and likely find yourself a touch disappointed with how many of them aren’t the best fighters. This is partly because they behave similar to how they do when you’re the one fighting them. When you’re up against a spear throwing Mobilin or axe swinging Darknut, the enemy having a short delay before they strike gives you time to evade, and you can even interrupt their attack if you strike at the right moment. This is sound enemy design, but since you’re often going to fight enemies by siccing your own enemy duplicates on them, it can get a bit frustrating to see your Echoes fail to land a hit against enemies as simple as a Crow as they exploit features normally meant for you to utilize. This can make the early game a bit slow, but over time you will get stronger and more capable Echoes including upgraded versions of the early ones, but more importantly you also get a special temporary form you can whip out that lets you engage in battle more directly. Slashing and firing arrows becomes a breeze in your heroic alternate form meaning if a Crow is pestering you, you can just take it out and move on. To keep the game from being all about this transformation, the time you can spend in it is quite limited. If the game does expect you to use its quicker combat options it will provide refills at least, this particularly important during boss battles, but at the same time, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom does have a great deal of boss fights that know the more interesting approach is to play into Echo use as the most crucial part of the fight.

Even with its first true boss besides a small prologue fight, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is already thinking of clever ways to construct a fight around Echoes. The Seismic Talus is a large stone golem whose weak point appears on different parts of its body, the player needing to consider their many options as it goes from the easy to strike bottom area to places like its shoulder or head. Overcoming bosses with good Echo use can make you feel clever because it’s often not that straightforward of a choice on what you should whip out, and they are often able to serve as puzzles despite being high energy conflicts. Health isn’t really much to worry about though, the game lavishing you with ingredients to make smoothies that you can pop open for quick huge heals midfight, so leaning more into figuring out what to do over true peril seems like it was the better approach. Fights in general do get more layered early on though once you find the Tri Rod has another useful function. The Tri Rod can fire out a beam of energy to Bind objects, this allowing you to move things at a distance or use it in other clever ways. This can be where using enemies in puzzle solving becomes deeper, such as latching onto a spider and letting it climb up a wall to carry you. You can also use Bind in regular combat to help your Echoes out, doing things like holding a baddie in place or getting creative with foes like the Beamos. A Beamos normally sits in place and fires its eye laser when it spots something, but carry it around and you can use it to pretty reliably zap foes. The Tri Rod’s two functions lead to the more interesting and challenging puzzles while also giving you ways to form your own solutions, sometimes able to make a different easier path than what the variables in an area seem to be nudging you towards.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is built from the same mold as The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening’s Switch remake, which not only means sometimes the action shifts from top-down 3D exploration to small side-scrolling puzzle areas, but it also gives the game a cute plastic toy look. This particular adventure actually begins with you almost playing a standard Legend of Zelda game as well, Link coming to save Zelda from Ganon only for hero and villain to get sucked into strange purple rifts that are spreading across Hyrule. These rifts look like a chunk of an area has just disappeared, not broken away so much as being erased without care for physics, and this ends up true of the Still Realm that exists within them that Zelda must periodically explore to set things right. After escaping the same fate as her captor and savior, Zelda travels the land to try and close all of the rifts and rescue Link, Link’s shadow still a bit large as he was a well known hero but Zelda is at least allowed to take on that mantle and help set right many places with unique conflicts. While she comes across a few different species with their own society, most of the conflicts in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom are fairly small and typical in their presentation. The new Goron chief doubts he can live up to his father and the two types of Zora fish people are feuding, but then you have the delightful strangeness of the plant people known as the Deku Scrubs having the conflict of everyone eating spider webs and calling it cotton candy because they’ve convinced themselves its fashionable. A lot of story elements are cute and simple and that seems to match the art style, but it does at least give you special situations across the kingdom, unique areas, and there are often side quests and secrets that can ask for new uses of your powers to earn goodies.

One unfortunate feature of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom that never gets solved even as you get deep into the game though is how you arrange your Echoes. Even before the number of options reaches beyond 100 Echoes, it becomes rather cumbersome to sort through them due to how their presented. For quick use, you can open a horizontal bar and scroll through it, but you must scroll past every object and creature to get to the one you want. There are a few sorting methods, such as sorting by most used Echoes, by type, or by cost since stronger Echoes or most useful options are often balanced by being used in small numbers while you can sometimes make little armies of basic foes or piles of cheap objects. However, this menu sorting can still lead to clutter, especially in atypical situations where you need to think of a new application of an echo rather than going for the common standbys. Pausing and opening the journal arranges them in multiple rows but is slower to use on the fly, and apparently, this was all by design. The developers said this awkward scrolling was meant to help players remember Echoes they might overlook otherwise, and while it does lead to some funny or exciting moments when you do suddenly find a neat use for a barely touched Echo, it also leads to a lot of game time wasted just fiddling with this menu. If the game had at least perhaps put one row for objects and another for enemies, maybe even split enemies into ground-based and flying, you could have three long rows where you could still get the same effect but also have things more navigable. Instead, convenience was sacrificed and sometimes a very basic action can be a bit of a chore since you have to go riffle through all the Echoes for the clear choice for that interaction.

THE VERDICT: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’s puzzle solving can be quite rewarding as you cook up inventive new ways to use Bind and Echoes to overcome obstacles. Gradually getting a few favorite tools but also having those moments where a forgotten Echo suddenly saves the day keeps the growing range of options you have interesting. It is a shame there is so much clutter, many enemies not worth duplicating and broadening the poorly designed Echo selection menu, but this version of Hyrule still has many places to test your problem solving creativity that the main adventure and its secrets are equally enjoyable to explore.

And so, I give The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. Echoes are a great concept for a puzzle solving tool and one that is made even richer through the Binding feature that can open up new functions and opportunities for them. Undoubtedly, there are many moment in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom where you get to perform neat experiments or come up with some clever uses, but it does start to run into an issue of its own invention. Being able to copy so many things makes you want to copy them, and with many even being important for at least one use, it’s not like skipping any is smart to do. You end up with an incredibly packed toolbox that starts to lose its novelty, and even when puzzles give you room to explore your options, you can start leaning on a few broadly useful Echoes instead just to save you the hassle of rummaging through your huge collection. It never gets so unwieldy it ruins the moments where you can be more playful with your options, side quests in particular encouraging some new uses and there are even “reward” echoes like strong monsters to find if you go off the beaten path from time to time. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom does build in some wise barriers as well to avoid Echo use becoming too tedious, the temporary fighter form letting you clear away small worries without it basically becoming the way you approach any trial. Dungeons are able to have unique obstacles that encourage special Echo use, your slowly growing stable of monsters start providing new ways to approach battle, and some nice background music suits the colorful world that you get to explore more deeply because of how much the game lets you get away with. Walking across the top of forest trees because you found a way up or scaling a mountain from the side instead of taking the intended trail help sell how many opportunities there are to make your own solutions to problems, it’s just a shame sometimes menu woes start to wear down your resolve to be so creative.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom definitely constructs a hearty quest where you feel like your mind is your most powerful weapon. Figuring out the best way to approach a fight, what tools are useful in a specific puzzle room, or how you can squeak out your own inventive solution to bypass an obstacle requires some of that wisdom Zelda is known for, and if a little more wisdom was put into structuring the underlying mechanics of the system, it would have been even more exciting to see just how many ways you can complete this adorable puzzle adventure.