How do you even review a Zelda game? They’re some of the most overtly influential video games in the medium’s history and are directly responsible for the art form’s growth several times over. It’s impossible to review a new mainline entry into the Zelda franchise in a vacuum because the series is forever linked to a legacy of industry-defining greatness.
These are the questions I would be asking if The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom didn’t live up to the standards set by the franchise, but thankfully it’s great when graded on any curve. Echoes of Wisdom lives up to the Zelda pedigree in all the ways longtime fans would hope for. The music is effective without becoming a distraction and worked into the game’s narrative thanks to an adorable quest to reunite two feuding Zora rulers. The Hummel figurine-like art direction is both endearing and lends itself well to the visual needs of a 2D Zelda game. Echoes of Wisdom‘s stylized graphical direction is a big part of why I’m going to remember it much more prominently than another recent 2D Zelda, like Cadence of Hyrule (though, no shade, that game whips for its own, rhythm game twist on the Zelda formula). Echoes of Wisdom even builds upon the long-running mythos of the Zelda franchise by establishing that the creation myth presented at the beginning of Ocarina of Time was an effort to seal away this game’s entropic antagonist, Null.
All of this is to say that if you like previous 2D Zelda games, you’re going to like this one! As a longtime fan of them myself, Echoes of Wisdom was everything I didn’t realize I missed from those games, with the only caveats being some framerate issues I barely noticed and load times that felt just a little too long for a 2024 video game. If you came to this review looking to answer the question, “Should I buy The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom for myself or someone else?” The answer is an enthusiastic “YUP!”
However, ANN only received the review code for Echoes of Wisdom upon its release, so a product review-style video game review won’t do too many people much good at this point. Instead, the rest of this review will dig a bit deeper into the most interesting and frustrating parts of this latest Zelda game. Namely, the new central mechanic where players summon monsters and objects, the game’s contrasting appropriation and improvement on Zelda iconography, and the thematic weight of Zelda finally being the protagonist of a Zelda game!
© Nintendo
The “Echo” mechanics of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom — in which the player can summon a duplicate of various objects and monsters they encounter to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and traverse the world — delivers all the satisfaction of the immersive sim elements of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, with more immediate gratification. One of my favorite parts of those two previous Zelda games was rolling up to a camp of monsters and using the various abilities, tools, and world interactions to wipe them out without them even realizing they were under attack. Echoes of Wisdom delivers a more compact version of this delightful gameplay experience, but packs in more varied environments and mechanical interactions.
Once your toolkit reaches a fair level of variety, addressing a specific situation feels more like an exercise in creativity than trying to intuit the developer’s intentions. Sure, you could summon a bird to glide across a lava pit with intermittent elevation points, or you could attach water blocks to the side wall and swim over the lava. You can activate the metered sword power-up and jump into a pit of enemies to defeat them, or you could summon a couple of wolfos and let those doggos make short work of most basic enemies.
Like any great game with immersive sim elements, Echoes of Wisdom feels like you’re getting away with something anytime you solve a problem with anything other than the most obvious solution. Of course, you’ll form habits or develop preferences in your summons (that old bed is SO GOOD for getting across canyons), and I found myself using the sword power-up pretty often against enemies that refilled the related meter upon defeat, but this always felt like the result of my choice instead of an expectation. Outside of a few situations designed to teach players how to use different abilities or summons, Echoes of Wisdom was always open and entertaining in its mechanics.
As for its narrative beats, these were more of a mixed bag. There is a lot of Zelda iconography packed into Echoes of Wisdom which, in and of itself, is a big part of the appeal of modern-day Zelda games. The franchise has a long history of reusing, remixing, and iterating upon past ideas in ways that always feel like a wink to longtime fans. For instance, the ocarina instrument made iconic by Ocarina of Time actually appears in the Link to the Past (though it’s called a flute in-game despite clearly being an ocarina). Witches are also a fun and infrequent recurring kind of character in Zelda games and, of course, Majora’s Mask is famous for reusing assets from Ocarina of Time to further drive home its themes of grief and loss.
© Nintendo
While Echoes of Wisdom has a few of its own fun takes on the Zelda lexicon, lots of its story ideas feel more like a callback than an improvement. To start with the positive, the storyline between the two species of Zora, river and sea, is super cute. The Zelda franchise rarely acknowledges the split between the mainstream scaly hot sea Zora and the monster-kink hot river Zora. This makes Echoes of Wisdom‘s storyline about the (obviously in love but are too stubborn to realize it) leaders of each tribe overcoming their pride to work together to appease the recurring giant fish god, Lord Jabu-Jabu, extra fun for longtime fans. This storyline isn’t groundbreaking by any means but is a fun little story that shows that there are still new angles and ideas to explore within the Zelda mythos.
On the other hand, there are a lot of narrative ideas in this game that feel like they’re only here because they’ve appeared in other Zelda games. The early storyline involving the Gerudo and an imposter advisor wreaking havoc is pretty forgettable and their dynamic with the larger world of the game is much more limited than what’s present in the world-building of Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. Most egregious for me, though, is the presence of Condé the yeti. While the character is perfectly endearing and his storyline one of the most emotionally affecting of the game, it’s also an overt riff on the yeti storyline in Twilight Princess.
The yeti plot in Echoes of Wisdom involves chasing Condé’s supposed brother up a mountain and to the end of a dungeon, only to discover that it’s actually a monster and the final boss of this area of the game. Twilight Princess‘ yeti plot involves sourcing ingredients from an abandoned mountainside manor — which is one of the most interesting and best dungeons in the Zelda franchise — to cure the yeti’s sick wife. However, the incredible twist to this storyline is that evil influences have corrupted the yeti’s wife and that you’ve actually been healing the final boss of this dungeon the entire time! I like Condé as a character and his presence in this game, but the story around him evokes one of the best ideas in the entire Zelda franchise and makes me wish I was playing those parts of Twilight Princess instead! I know that comparison is the thief and/or death of joy, but I can’t help but think less of Echoes of Wisdom for being filled with ideas I’ve seen done better in other parts of the franchise.
© Nintendo
That being said, Echoes of Wisdom‘s big new idea, actually playing as the titular Zelda, is executed phenomenally. The game acknowledges Zelda’s long-awaited status subtly and thematically rather than being the overt text of the game, which is the correct decision as an in-your-face “girl power” narrative would be tonally dissonant with the rest of the Zelda franchise. In this game, Zelda grows into the role of a hero as the story progresses. First, she has to save the kingdom in secret while wearing a hood that conceals her identity after being branded a traitor and threat to the world by an evil doppelganger of her father, the King of Hyrule. After rescuing her father and many of the citizens of Hyrule Castle Town, Zelda is allowed to overtly be the hero while wearing a tomboyish version of her adventure garb. Finally, towards the end of the game and after completing a few side quests, Zelda can dawn her traditional princess gown and save the kingdom while displaying the kind of femininity she’s been associated with throughout much of the series.
Echoes of Wisdom is Zelda’s Zelda game, and her long overdue journey to become the hero of her franchise is tasteful, touching, and a lot of fun.
Echoes of Wisdom isn’t a major overhaul of the Zelda franchise, but rather a meaningful iteration of what it can be. Grounded in familiar iconography, the game opens a franchise associated with pristine innovation to even more possibilities in terms of who can lead a Zelda game and how a player can engage with the world through them. Echoes of Wisdom is not a major leap forward in gaming like several of its predecessors, but instead an important half step in figuring out what this next leap looks like, which is also true of many of the games in the Zelda canon. Echoes of Wisdom may not be the best Zelda game, but it’s one of the most interesting, and I can’t wait to see where the franchise takes these new ideas.
