Game Review: Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Let me lead with a score: 7/10.

I overall enjoyed the core gameplay and thought that the story was completely mid, which normally would result in a better overall impression of a game. Unfortunately, the core gameplay was a lot weaker than it should have been owing to some of the game design decisions, and I have to knock the story points for taking far too much time and being sluggish to get through.

The idea of Echoes of Wisdom is that you collect “echoes” of objects you find and then use them to get through the game. You get the echo of a bed and use two of them to cross a gap. You use the bed to make a ladder to get to higher places. You use the bed to make a bridge, which is really just crossing a gap again. You use the bed to press a switch to open a door. You learn “old bed” very early on, and in my case, it felt like the solution to far too many problems.

The biggest issue is just game design: they didn’t do enough of it. In theory from a game mechanics standpoint there should have been ~10 echoes that are mechanically orthogonal to each other, fulfilling different roles. In practice, there are 127 echoes, the menu for accessing them is a mess, and the vast majority of them are redundant. Even the ones that are technically distinct don’t have much mechanical distance from each other: you use fire to light torches and lightning to light up green crystals, and this really felt, while playing, like a lazy reskin.

It kind of reminded me of the Green Lantern having the power to make “anything he can imagine” and then 90% of the time using it to make a fist.

Included in those 127 echoes are “combat” echoes, which you get from defeating enemies. They fight for you, and some of them can do other things, but mostly it’s the fighting. In most circumstances, you just use the most powerful guy you can, with the exceptions being flying enemies and very rarely needing some kind of elemental counter or the bomb fish.

Some of this is surely driven by game design principles, namely “don’t let the player get stuck because they didn’t pick up the right echoes along the way”. I sympathize with this, but it also kind of sucks, because it makes everything feel bland. There’s surely a “minimum echoes” category, just like Mario Odyssey has “minimum captures”, and my guess is that you’d only need around 10, and that of those 10, there’s just not that much that they actually do differently.

This is especially a shame when compared to Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, where the tools are wildly different. Magnesis, Bomb, Ice Block, Time Stop? Those four together have more mechanical variety and combinatorial possibility than all 127 echoes in Echoes of Wisdom. And Tears of the Kingdom was amazing, one of those times when I would sit back and marvel at how much variety and complexity there was, how many challenges were brought forth by really good game design. That doesn’t exist here.

So the game mechanical premise is cool, but they don’t do too much with it. How’s the story?

Told in a different way, I probably would have found it fine. Instead, the heaps of dialogue, slow animations between pieces of dialogue, minimal quality of those animations, and cutsceneitis made me repeatedly roll my eyes. The fact that it was the same locations as other Zelda games also detracted from it, which is something they’re going to run into if they keep having the same fantasy races over and over and over.

I think the older I get, the more I hate being stopped in the middle of a game to read a bunch of text, and this is especially true when the gameplay disconnects itself from its story. So if they had snappy responses to me pressing the “yes, I have read this” button, and animation skips that have been present in the vast majority of games for the last five to ten years, I would have liked it better. Instead, I was fighting annoyance with how slow they made everything, particularly the animations for nodding and looking surprised and all these other things. You can have these animations while the text box is being read! We have the technology!

The mute protagonist also doesn’t help, and I don’t really understand why they used it here except for legacy reasons. Zelda is the character we’re spending the most time with, she definitely has a history and perspective, and instead we get very little of her thoughts and feelings. If the intent was to help me project myself into her shoes, it did not work.

So I think this is going to be my last Nintendo game, at least for a while. This game as an 86 on Metacritic, and I’m going to take my overall dislike of many aspects of it as a sign that it’s just not for me. I was giving Mario & Luigi: Brothership an appraising look, but this is the game that convinced me that I just don’t like the slow, clunky interface to formulaic surface-level stories. I would look past that for good, mechanically rich gameplay, but now it’s seeming more hit and miss.