Rating of
4/5
When All Else Fails, Bring Out the Beds
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 04/30/25
Nintendo took me completely by surprise when, in September 2024, they stealth released a new entry in their stories ‘Legend of Zelda’ series. I was not overly enamored of their seminal 9th Generation entry in the series, dubbing it “Break of the Weapons,” since the acronym fits and that’s about the only thing I actually remember about the experience. My initially more-favorable-than-not view of that game only dropped as I broadened my horizons and experienced some more Sandbox games and found that Nintendo had just completely ripped-off and copied mechanics from other games, ruining a perfectly good ‘Zelda’ game in the process. This dismal view of their open world efforts has lead me to not even bother with the sequel to “Break of the Weapons,” “Tears of the Kingdom.”
What I wanted was a new top-down, traditional ‘Zelda’ game in the vein of the original game, “A Link to the Past,” or “The Minish Cap,” titles whose relevance to the ‘Zelda’ IP grows more distant by the day. Thus I was absolutely flabbergasted when the latest entry in the series proved to be just that. Furthermore, the game in question, “The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom” (“EoW”) was also a callback to a dark period of Nintendo’s history when they dallied with the idea of allowing Phillips to create not only a disc-based 5th Gen console for them, but also some second-party entries in their most valuable IPs. Several abortive ‘Zelda’ games came out of this effort, with “The Wand of Gamelon” proving to be the closest to that modern-day high-hurdle of ‘finished and playable,’ while also being the first entry in the ‘Zelda’ series to feature the titular character as the main protagonist.
Thus it was with great delight that I ordered a copy of “EoW” without waiting for a rare discount, as the promise of a new traditional entry in one of my favorite Nintendo IPs with a story throwback that attempts to redeem some of Nintendo’s past mistakes was simply too much in my wheelhouse to resist.
Presentation
Nintendo has been behaving more and more like a typical Industrial Gaming corporation lately, and that includes farming out their valuable IPs to small-time development studios to work on games they don’t consider to be important enough. Instead of using an established second-party studio, like HAL Labs, or a well-known third-party – such as when they had Capcom develop the “The Oracle of Ages” and “The Oracle of Seasons” for the Gameboy Color – this time, Nintendo farmed out development to Grezzo, a small time Japanese studio founded in 2006 by a disgruntled ex-Square-Enix employee, and named for the Italian word for ‘rough’ (as in ‘diamond in the’). Grezzo has a long history of creating ports of ‘Zelda’ games for Nintendo dating all the way back to 2011. Their most recent ‘Zelda’-related project was the Switch remake of “Link’s Awakening,” where they build the engine from scratch, then re-created the old Gameboy game in the new engine.
Grezzo recycled the “Link’s Awakening” engine in “EoW” and simply used it as a toolkit to create a new, similar-feeling ‘Zelda’ game. Of course, back in the day, my friends and I always referred to “Link’s Awakening” as ‘the stupid one,’ due to its silly tone and attempt to shoehorn more platforming into the Action/Adventure formula (but at least it was better than “The Adventure of Link”). But, honestly, after such a long, long time since the previous traditional ‘Zelda’ game, I’ll take ‘stupid’ over ‘bad’ any day.
Unfortunately, Grezzo’s ‘Zelda’ engine features extremely child-friendly and stylized graphics that make the world and all its people look like Fisher-Price Little People playsets. While the stylized monsters and environments still manage to look pretty good, the people are just painful to look at. Everyone (except the King of Hyrule) has the same body type with just a different hairstyle and vaguely-different facial features slapped on. This makes it really hard to tell women apart from men, which is actually an issue due to the fact that the Gerudo Tribe has a sizeable presence in his game. In spite of the highly-constrained character designs, they still manage to be fairly expressive, with Zelda’s mood fluctuating between ‘happy,’ ‘angry,’ and ‘non-plussed’ when receiving items in a very readable way.
Audio feels very much like the composer, Hajime Wakai, was trying to create a soundtrack for a generic Action/Adventure game that sounds enough like the traditional ‘Zelda’ soundtrack to elicit positive feelings from fans, while retaining culpable deniability. That is to say, it’s good, but not great, and has already slithered forth from my memory. Aside from the soundtrack, the game is unvoiced, with only a handful of very-Japanese-sounding grunts and groans to accompany text boxes.
Technically, “EoW” is published by Nintendo and co-developed by Nintendo, so it had damned well better WORK right… and it does. I had no problems with the game’s performance, QoL features, or anything else. It’s just a very solid ‘game product’ that’s a little hard to look at and uninspiring to listen to. However, the game does have a rather low frame-rate, which I found jarring when switching between “EoW” and other games on my PC.
Story
The game opens with the player controlling a fully powered-up Link heading into battle against a giant, blue pig-man (who shall remain nameless through the ENTIRE game). Link’s goal is to rescue Princess Zelda, who has been captured inside a giant crystal and is being held in the monster’s inner sanctum. Upon defeating the monster, Link starts trying to figure out how to free Zelda from her crystalline prison when some sort of evil magic starts to collapse the temple and absorb the floor beneath his feet. Just before submerging in the purplish mass, Link fires a single arrow at Zelda’s crystal, allowing her to eventually break free. She must then run through a ‘Metroid’-style escape sequence as the building falls to ruin right on her heels.
Upon escaping, Zelda returns to Hyrule Castle, much to the shock of the King and the royal guards who have been searching for her. During her audience with the King, Zelda and the player are both brought up to speed on a scourge of so-called ‘rifts’ that have been plaguing Hyrule recently, absorbing land, buildings, and even people. Some of the people absorbed by rifts have managed to escape, but they are always changed by the experience.
No sooner do we get an idea of what Hyrule is up against, but a giant rift appears in the throne room of the castle, absorbing the King and his two advisors. However, moments later, they re-emerge from the rift with a decidedly different worldview: Zelda is the villain causing the rifts, and she is to be executed the next day!
During the night, Zelda manages to escape from the castle dungeon with the help of a weird, abstract spirit only she can see, who introduces itself as Tri. The spirit then goes on to explain that it and its friends used to be responsible for repairing the rifts as they formed, but recently Tri’s friends have gone missing in vast enough numbers that the rifts have grown out of control. Since Zelda can see Tri and Tri needs help freeing its friends, the two form an unlikely alliance, with Tri producing a magical wand (not of Gamelon, unfortunately) that allows its wielder to capture and summon the so-called ‘echoes’ of various things in the world, both living and inanimate.
With the help of Tri and her elderly nursemaid, Impa, Zelda escapes from the dungeon, only to find herself on the lam, with only some vague hints to seek out Impa’s brother and the missing swordsman for aid.
“EoW” is not nearly as open-world as recent flagship ‘Zelda’ games, but it definitely does show influence from them. The story is broadly divided into three acts which contain sub-sections that can be tackled in any order, and which revolve around self-contained stories dealing with sealing a giant rift and helping one of Hyrule’s many tribes in the process.
“EoW” isn’t terribly long – I think I clocked about 30 hours – and it goes by quite quickly. At the beginning of the game, I felt daunted by the humongous, blank world map. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the game’s chunky, child-friendly visuals make each area feel smaller than it otherwise might. The individual story vignettes that make up each act are ‘fine,’ though nothing particularly original or spectacular. However, the metaphysics and behind-the-scenes world lore revealed in “EoW” feel quite a bit different from any previous ‘Zelda’ games, introducing an entirely new villainous force behind the game’s obstacles, while still maintaining the tri-codomy of Wisdom, Courage, and Power.
Unfortunately, the ‘Zelda’ timeline is such a disaster at this point, it’s hard to make sense of how things fit together without adding new components. Regardless, “EoW” is fully self-contained and resolved by the end, meaning that it shouldn’t ultimately make the timeline any messier.
Gameplay
“EoW’s” most noteworthy feature is that it breaks with series tradition and puts the player in control of the titular Zelda, rather than her perpetual rescuer, Link. Indeed, it does a bit of role reversal, with Zelda spending most of the game looking for Link and fighting off evil Link doppelgangers.
Because Zelda is a girl, and Japan actually understands that traditional gender roles exist for a reason, she does not get involved directly in combat… for the most part. Instead, any defeated enemy can be summoned as an ‘echo’ minion, which acts with the same AI as a normal monster of its type, but generally can’t cause harm to Zelda herself (there are exceptions, such as the slime that sets things on fire). Zelda also differs from Link in that, rather than gathering up a whole slew of tools and magical artifacts to get stronger, she primarily uses echoes of non-living things – like furniture – to solve puzzles and navigate past obstacles.
Of course, because Zelda’s skillset can be a bit aggravating to work with in the heat of combat, especially against a big, bad boss monster, Impa’s brother – a famous inventor – gifts Zelda with Link’s recovered sword, bow, and bombs, knows as the Sword of Might, Bow of Might, and Bombs of Might. Zelda can’t actually use these with her own strength, but the Mighty Items’ gimmick is that they can transform ANYONE into a competent swordsman… for a limited time, by consuming magical power. Thus, Zelda can temporarily turn into a magic-fueled cheap knock-off of Link to get in a few reliable attacks against enemies before running out of magic and reverting to herself.
I cannot stress enough how little use Swordsman Form actually is, coming into play primarily during boss fights and when dealing with flying trash mobs. For the vast majority of the game, the player will be using Zelda’s own unique abilities… and they provide a fresh, inspiring, and generally fun take on the traditional ‘Zelda’ formula.
However, there are a couple of caveats about the gameplay that really can’t be ignored. First, combat echoes – that is, summoned monsters – are almost all incredibly stupid and slow. They all have long wind-up animations and take a while to ‘think’ about what to do (even when Zelda is targeting what she want them to attack with the lock-on button), making most combat feel sluggish and tedious rather than quick and snappy. The other caveat is that, with the huge number of objects Zelda can copy, none are more useful than… a bed. Yes, a BED. Not only can Zelda sleep in a bed to recover hearts at ANY time, but beds have a very low summon cost, so Tri can maintain the maximum amount of copies of them possible at any given point in the game. Beds can be stacked to create staircases, bridges, floating docks, or any number of other makeshift devices. They are so versatile that they can be used to navigate almost every obstacle the game throws at Zelda, completely ignoring the intended way of doing things. Zelda summoning a butt-load of beds to solve all of her problems isn’t just something I noticed, but is such an obvious issue with the game that it has become an Internet meme.
Still, if the game wants to encourage open-world exploration and creative puzzle solving, there are worse ways to do it than allowing the player to spam beds everywhere! In fact, the worst parts of the game all revolve around this ‘other method’ of creating varied gameplay: Mini-games! “EoW” is absolutely chock-full of annoying minigames, but is only the most recent manifestation of a growing problem within the ‘Zelda’ series. “A Link to the Past” only had 2 mini-games, and they were both easy. “EoW” has significantly more than 2, and unlocking all of the rewards requires a significant amount of practice and trial-and-error, to the point where, after finishing the game, I couldn’t be bothered to 100% the collectables, since the mini-games were annoying me so much.
Other than the plague of mini-games, the only real fundamental problems with “EoW” from a gameplay perspective are a handful of small balance things. For example, Zelda, like Link before her, can collect a handful of bottles, in which to store fairies. Fairies will revive Zelda if she falls in battle… and my one and only death in this game came from the fact that enemies (especially bosses) deal a LOT of damage per hit, while a fairy will only restore 3 hearts. Health potions, magic potions, and combo potions also restore a similarly low amount of health and magic, making them completely useless when compared side-by-side with the game’s core potion mechanic: Smoothies. Smoothies are made by combining 2 ingredients at a special Deku Scrub merchant. Once two ingredients have been combined once, it ads that recipe to the ‘known’ list, allowing the player to fairly quickly determine the optimal ingredients to use (milk and salt… ALWAYS) to get a potion that restores a large amount of hearts and all magic. And Zelda can carry significantly more smoothies than she can fairies, making the latter even less relevant.
Overall
If you’re a veteran fan of ‘The Legend of Zelda’ and aren’t exactly thrilled with the direction the series is moving, “The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom” just might alleviate your fears of Nintendo abandoning top-down, classic-style ‘Zelda’ games altogether. In spite of cleaving to foundational mechanics in many respects, “EoW” is still loaded with new, fresh ideas, making for a unique and engaging sequel that feels completely different, while remaining recognizably the same. If you can get past the slightly-off-putting visual stylings and overlook a few minor balance issues, you’re in for a treat with this one.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
