The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is incredible. Grezzo has seized its first chance to create a brand-new entry in The Legend of Zelda series and the result is nothing short of a triumph.
After an unknown swordsman in green saves Princess Zelda from captivity, she returns to Hyrule Castle to learn that the rifts that have long plagued the kingdom are worsening. The unsettling phenomenon has resulted in children being “stolen away,” but, despite the King of Hyrule’s best efforts to prevent the rifts from appearing, adults are now disappearing inside them too.
It is Princess Zelda’s fateful encounter with Tri that lends some hope to the situation, teaming up with this ethereal companion to mend the rifts, save those trapped inside them and reveal the truth behind what has been happening. Wielding the Tri Rod with which she can conjure echoes – imitations of objects or copies of monsters – she sets out to save the people of Hyrule.
Echoing Link’s recent open-air adventures, Princess Zelda’s quest continues to lean into granting the player freedom over their own experience. That first comes from being able to chart your own path through the game. After completing the introductory prologue and conquering the game’s first dungeon, your initial choice is whether to brave Gerudo Desert’s sandstorms or journey to Jabul Waters to resolve a musical squabble between the River Zora and Sea Zora. You could even distract yourself with side quests, unlocking new echoes, gathering smoothie ingredients and recovering Pieces of Heart.
That sense of freedom also comes from being able to use echoes to deduce your own solutions to the puzzles that you encounter. There are 127 echoes for Princess Zelda to learn in the game, and by its conclusion, I had learned 123. I’m still hunting for the last four. While there are some duplicates – higher-level versions of enemies that attack faster and deal more damage, mainly – there is tremendous breadth to the echoes that you can create and the opportunities that they present.
From using Ignizols to set torches ablaze to sneaking by enemies after distracting them with the irresistible, savoury aroma of a Grilled Fish, there’s so much room for you to come up with your own solutions and make Princess Zelda’s adventure your own. I’m most excited to see the ways that others will tackle puzzles differently compared to how I managed to overcome them. I even ended up wasting half an hour trying to work out if there was a shovel in the game before a “Eureka” moment struck and I realised that Holmills can burrow in soft earth.
Some areas could be improved, however. I wish that, aside from within the side-scrolling sections, there was a way to rotate echoes. I regularly stacked Old Beds to clamber up to reach higher terrain and frequently felt frustrated at how awkward it was to place them in a specific direction. I also wish that there was a better way to manage the echoes that you are using. Whenever you pull up the menu, the game only lets you categorise your echoes by Last Used, Most Used, Last Learned, Cost or Type. This isn’t as much of a problem early on, but, once you eventually unlock all 127 echoes over the course of the game, it started to become noticeable how much time I was wasting scrolling left and right through them all. The only alternative is your Notebook in the pause menu, where you can choose which echo you want to use from a single screen. Even then, every method detracted in slowing down the gameplay flow.
It won’t come as a particular surprise that your progression through the storyline will see you leap into rifts to mend them. As you look to resolve the quandaries that are impacting each of Hyrule’s regions – the Deku Scrubs’ latest addiction in the Faron Wetlands was a personal favourite that I chuckled at – you must first deal with smaller rifts in which Tri’s otherworldly friends are trapped before you can dive into the large rifts that contain the game’s main dungeons.
The dungeons don’t disappoint, classic in their look and design but modernised with a new approach as you use echoes to solve the puzzle instances that they present and quell the dark monsters that inhabit them. Big Key eventually secured, the bosses that await you at their conclusion are a highlight too, challenging you to once again think in new ways to vanquish them as has often been the case in Nintendo’s long-running series. I’d even go as far as to say that, for me at least, the game’s final encounter will forever rank as an all-time great.
Your efforts to close rifts reward you with Might Crystals which can be used at Lueberry’s House to upgrade Princess Zelda’s abilities in her Swordfighter Form. While the gameplay largely encourages you to use echoes to do your dirty work for you, this, for the duration of a draining energy gauge, grants her access to Link’s sword-fighting, arrow-flinging and bomb-blasting skills – perfect for getting stuck in with busier combat encounters and boss battles.
Freeing Tri’s friends will also level up your companion’s abilities, gradually allowing you to create more echoes at once, reducing the cost of more powerful creations and letting you cast echoes from a distance. I often used Tri’s Bind ability to shift objects out of the way, but Reverse Bond proved to be a constant frustration. After connecting to a moving platform or monster, you can choose to “follow” its path to help you reach your destination. There’s a side quest called Glide Path that I still haven’t completed because it’s a minigame where you’re supposed to glide to a flag without touching the ground, using updrafts to help you glide further. Without any direct control, Reverse Bond left me helplessly dangling from every flying monster I could conjure while I blankly stared at the screen hoping it would fly in the right direction. They more often don’t. Maybe I completely missed something here, but it was a gameplay mechanic that I rarely found a beneficial use for.
There’s some semblance of cooking, in that the ingredients that you gather can be used at a Business Scrub’s Smoothie Shop. Here, you can choose two ingredients to mix into a smoothie with different effects similar to meals in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, temporarily increasing your swim speed, reducing the damage that you take or giving you a radiant glow to illuminate darkened caves. I came to rely on these more to recover hearts than for such bonuses, but I’m sure that they will be far more useful to those who choose to play the Hero Mode difficulty where you take twice as much damage and no hearts drop.
Away from your main quest, there’s more than enough content to keep you busy. That ranges from the game’s many characterful side quests to keeping Stamp Guy happy by being the only person to complete his stamp cards, galloping around Hyrule Ranch participating in Flag Races, dressing up in a costume to chat to cats, eliminating monster camps or scooping up acorns within a time limit.
The diorama-like art direction continues to look even more charming than it did in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake, and, despite some rare frame rate stutters, this much more ambitious game runs near enough flawlessly on the increasingly aged Nintendo Switch hardware. The game’s soundtrack, too, is magical and enchanting, and the composers really managed to capture the spirit of Princess Zelda’s adventure.
After Princess Peach’s turn in the spotlight, Princess Zelda readily demonstrates that she is more than capable of saving her own kingdom. Grezzo should be incredibly proud of what they have achieved here, delivering a complete reinvention of what awaits us in a top-down adventure across the kingdom of Hyrule with an experience in which past and present collide that succeeds in repeatedly subverting your expectations.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by Nintendo