Media in Review: The Legend of Zelda - Echoes of Wisdom
Those of you who are familiar with my past takes know that I am staunch Zelda traditionalist. I was raised on Link to the Past, my heart will always belong to the N64/Gamecube era of Zelda design, and Breath of the Wild bored me enough that I didn't even bother picking up Tears. I say this not because I need an excuse to spout my hot takes, but because Echoes of Wisdom is doing its best to marry the open-ended freeform puzzle solving of Breath/Tears with the more restricted, dungeon-based puzzling that you would find in Ocarina or Wind Waker, and the result is...okay, I guess.
The game's primary gimmick and puzzle-solving mechanic is the Tri Rod, a staff that allows Zelda to summon "echoes" of stuff, more or less replacing Link's entire toolkit and mechanics. These echoes can be anything from beds and trampolines for platforming purposes, enemies that fight for you, or simply bits of old Zelda mechanics that they just couldn't let go of entirely. Most things can be learned upon encountering them for the first time (enemies will have to be defeated first), and this is by far the greatest strength of Echoes - almost anything is a valid puzzle tool, and if it gets the job done, it doesn't really matter which one of them you went with. While there are a handful of sidequests that ask for a specific item or monster, for the most part what matters is that you have a collection of echoes with the attribute you need: something that makes fire, something that's heavy, something that can attack underwater, etc.
This leads us to two immediate problems: First, the menu for selecting echoes is atrocious. It's functionally just the equipment menu from Breath/Tears, except it's a single file line that's easily 50-100 deep by the end of the game. There's a couple ways you can sort it (last used, most used, last learned, cost, type), but none of them are very good, and it's absolutely miserable anytime you need to go digging for a specific echo from three dungeons ago. Second, despite all of this mechanical rejiggering, the game is still very much rooted in traditional Zelda design, but everything has been made slightly more inconvenient. You may not get a Bomb Bag, but you're still going to see breakable walls and blocks everywhere, and you're going to get a Bomb Fish that you can summon to do the exact same thing. The bow becomes an octorok, the sword a moblin, so on and so forth. It's all superficial, and largely controlled by monsters who only sometimes do what you want them to do.
And speaking of monsters, let's quickly talk about combat. Zelda can't do much of anything herself, so she relies on monster echoes to do the fighting for her. This results in the first hour or so being a lot of summoning and throwing pots at enemies, while snakes and zols get some hits in here and there. Thankfully, you get Link's sword in the first dungeon (allowing you to turn into Link for a limited time, complete with a normal sword attack), and shortly thereafter you can get a Sword or Club Moblin to handle "normal" combat. Once you have a set of monsters that you're comfortable with, it's pretty smooth sailing, and even bosses usually just turn into using an echo to deal with its gimmick, then pounding it with Link's sword for actual damage. I would have preferred if the game gave you a shitty L1 sword as part of Zelda's permanent kit, if only to keep the opening bits from being such a slog, but I understand why they didn't. It doesn't mean I have to like it, though.
As for the dungeons themselves, they vary wildly in both scope and design. For me, the standouts were the Gerudo and Deku temples, both of which were multifloor affairs that required you to leave the dungeon itself and explore the area around it to find other entrances. I also want to shout out the Ice dungeon for being a textbook N64-era Zelda dungeon, built around a central gimmick that you have to understand how it interacts with almost every room in order to progress. The rest are either forgettable or bad - linear combat gauntlets with not a puzzle in sight (Zora), or such a nothingburger that even now I cannot remember anything about it aside from the boss fight (Goron). I'm still glad they're here! I would never claim that I like Ocarina's Water Temple or Wind Waker's Wind Temple, but they provide a certain experience that would otherwise be missing, and the same goes for this game.
Finally, a quick note on the game's overall structure. It's built on the Link's Awakening (2019) engine, so it combines a fairly straightforward top-down experience with some side-scrolling platforming, and Echoes of Wisdom really leans into the latter. Zelda has a jump built into her basic mechanics, and most of what passes for puzzles on the overworld are about traversal. How do I get up on that ledge? Can I really just walk across the top of the trees? More often than not, you'll find out that not only can you, they expected you to, because there's a Stamp Station waiting for you on the other side. They really lean into the verticality here, which is neat, but more than a little janky because LA was not really built for platforming. This is doubly true for the side-scrolling sections, which are way more numerous. Most entrances on the overworld lead to one instead of a more traditional cave, and pretty much every dungeon tends to have them between floors. It's a neat idea, and it certainly gives the game a unique identity, I just wish they worked a little better.
All in all, Echoes of Wisdom is Fine™. This is no small feat for a game that is largely attempting to fuse two of my least favorite Zelda games, and maybe I wouldn't be so forgiving if the last time we got a game like this wasn't a full decade ago in A Link Between Worlds. The echo system is neat, but I've had my fill of it, and I would love to see another take on these ideas with a more traditional Zelda kit. There's definitely more meat on these bones, and I hope Grezzo gets another crack at it, but the game as-is is just a little too janky and a little too frustrating for my tastes.