It’s solid not to focus on playing Zelda The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Link has been the main player character in the series since its inception, with the exception of a few minor moments and collective hallucinations that were CDi titles. So it’s been a long time.
But it takes more than just the opportunity to wear a dress to excite me. Zelda is as empty as Link. Her personality changes depending on the needs of the game, and most of the time she still manages to be the most monotonous person in the room. Luckily Echoes of Wisdom is more than just a person wearing a dress. Instead, it mixes elements from the series to create something distinct with appropriately blended results.
You start out as the eminent green skirt hero, Link. You’ll get a tutorial on how to connect exactly, which would be a clever misdirection if Echoes of Wisdom he didn’t reveal the plot on the cover. You fight with your sword and shield A link to the past-era Ganon, but on the cusp of success, the earth opens up and swallows Link.
Zelda, who was inexplicably captured before the events of the game, then steps into the player character’s shoes. Hyrule appears to have been engulfed by the ominous rifts, sucking in anyone who was standing there at the time. As Zelda, you must find a way to close it and save the people (including Link) along with your own crazy generic supporting partner, Tri.
Big twist Zelda The formula is that you can summon objects into the environment, and the typical gameplay involves you having to figure out how to exploit them to avoid obstacles. In this respect it is very similar Tears of the Kingdom. Even with the top-down perspective and less complicated physics engine, that too I feel I like it very much Tears of the Kingdomwhich is fine. This invites many comparisons to a much larger game on the same system, but at least it does Echoes of Wisdom has classic dungeons.
You can also create any non-boss enemy in the game, and fighting alongside Moblin is extremely satisfying. Zelda itself mainly comes down to pulling something bulky out of the ether and throwing it at enemies. Near the game, he gains the ability to transform into Link and fight in a more cocky manner, but the transformation is quite short-lived, meaning you can’t simply decide to play as Link for the entire game.
On the other hand, you can fill this bar with a properly blended smoothie that Echoes of Wisdom he has a strange obsession. Throughout your adventures, you’ll stumble upon apples and sticks of butter, which you can then take to the affable Deku Scrub to mix into a useful item with various properties. It’s a bit like a cooking system Breath of the Wildbut much less profound.
The cocktail obsession has another downside Echoes of Wisdom believes that ingredients are a valuable reward. There’s nothing more devastating than completing a side quest or climbing into an out-of-reach treasure chest and discovering it contains five cacti. I don’t expect to get a piece of heart every time I find someone’s cat, but by the time I finished the game I was carrying around an entire grocery store of unused food.
This is going to sound like I’m really depressed Echoes of Wisdom for most of this review, but I want to emphasize that this is because it doesn’t really stand up to the comparisons it’s preparing itself for. He uses the world A link to the past with its borders expanded and parts of it a bit mixed up, but it never comes close to matching. The echo system can make you feel astute, but not to this level Tears of the Kingdom does. However, it’s a decent game in its own right.
I’m ecstatic to see the return of the art style used in Link’s Awakening redo. I think his toy look is very cute and relates well to the 2D games in the series. However, how Link’s Awakeningthe frame rate is extremely inconsistent. This hasn’t changed. Traveling the world means often seeing your game start to choke. It’s bad enough that a sudden drop in frame rate threw me off balance during a minigame and caused me to fail it. Not the end of the world, but never something you want to see.
I was never committed to the world/dungeon format from beforeBreath of the Wild games, but it’s nice to see Echoes of Wisdom come back to this for a change. Typically, dungeons are also preceded by “Still World” segments in which pieces of the landscape float in empty space, sometimes at unusual angles. The challenges here aren’t usually as complicated as the dungeons themselves, but they’re a decent snack.
For that matter, the dungeons are a bit disappointing. Unfortunately they chose A link to the past the world as a setting, as the monotonous delves really contrast strongly with the thematic focus of the SNES title. Even though I finished the game last night and got through the whole thing in a compact amount of time, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you how each dungeon was different from one another. I could tell you why Zora is special, but nothing more.
This may be a side effect of the echo system; it’s solid to polish the puzzles when there are so many things to explain. When experimentation is encouraged, it’s solid to prevent shortcuts. There was one repetitive puzzle where you had to place a block on two tiles at once. I managed to come up with a method that bypassed the designer’s intent to solve it and work every time.
But in the absence of a solution to this self-inflicted pain, most of the puzzles involve how to place an object on a switch or simply traverse complex terrain. As a result, everything becomes monotonous, and this feeling increases as you progress. I became very adept at moving around and using the switches, so halfway through it all became routine.
For a game that encourages players to exploit their innovative imagination, there is a noticeable lack of it in the design Echoes of Wisdom. It feels like the development team was pushing for limits that weren’t there, and they failed at it. Like I said, it’s a decent game in its own right, it’s just not particularly memorable Zelda game, which is ironic in a way.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom adds a recent dimension to the series’ formula, but never quite finds its footing. I enjoy coming up with innovative ways to exploit my bed as much as the next person, but I would prefer if the challenges were more innovative instead. Instead, everything just meshed together until I could just play on autopilot. It takes more than just a dress and a bed to keep things engaging.
