The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom marks the first time the series’ titular character is the main playable one: it’s finally Zelda’s moment to shine, and she doesn’t disappoint, for her game manages to blend the modern Zelda ethos of favoring player expression with the series’ classic dungeon template even more successfully than the recent 3D outings. Her game falters – somewhat ironically – only in not giving the princess a proper voice.

At first, it seems to be business as usual. Our hero Link, armed with a sword and shield, is delving deep into a dungeon to save Princess Zelda and kill a menacing oversized pig. However, after he wins the day, a sinister rift opens in the ground and swallows him whole, but not before he manages to shoot a single arrow that shatters Zelda’s crystal prison. Free at last, it’s now up to the princess to take up his mantle – I’m sorry, his cloak from the ground – and save Hyrule.

Unlike Link, Zelda is royalty. When she goes back to Hyrule Town, she’s surrounded by worried townsfolk and soldiers: it’s been a week since she vanished, and people were fearing the worst. When a kid asks Zelda if she’s been “out doing princess stuff or something,” he’s scolded on the spot by her mother for being impolite to someone of such status. The woman quickly apologizes to Zelda, “I’m so sorry, Princess. You know how kids can be,” and her son whimsically follows, “Sorry for being a kid.” The things this kid will be sorry for throughout the game are a wonderful continuing gag, and we’ll forgive him every time because we may enter people’s homes and break all their pots, but we’re not heartless monsters.

And it’s fascinating to notice how, despite being a princess, Zelda is basically no one as soon as she steps out of her town. Gorons, Zoras, Dekus, the people of smaller villages, they have no idea who she is: to the rest of the world, it’s Link who’s a celebrity, because it’s Link and not the King and his army, the one who has been traveling throughout the land to save the people from monsters and disasters.

This Hyrule has always been plagued by terrible rifts, purple chasms that open suddenly in the ground and take children away, leaving parents nothing but grief. “Stolen away. A tidy phrase for a terrible fate,” the king’s General laments. But things are getting a lot worse, as the rifts have now begun swallowing adults too, taking over people’s entire homes and villages. Soon after we arrive in the castle, for example, we witness the king of Hyrule himself and his advisors all become victims of a rift. However, unlike the others, they quickly reappear from the purple hole somewhat changed: they suddenly order the princess to be locked away in the castle dungeon, accusing her of creating the rift, and Zelda’s father even sentences her… to death.

Luckily for Zelda, while she’s locked away waiting for her execution, a spirit named Tri forces (I hope the pun made you sigh in total disbelief) their way into her company and hands her a magical staff that can create echoes – copies, if you will – of most things in the game’s world. This makes Zelda stand apart from Link as a protagonist: while he defeats monsters and lifts blocks of stone with his own two hands, the princess – very appropriately, I might add – has others do the dirty work for her. “You’ve always been quite spirited, though I didn’t expect you to make it back on your own,” her old friend Impa tells her when she arrives back at the castle. Zelda’s no warrior, in other words, and even her most trusted advisor didn’t expect her to directly fight the monsters that kidnapped her.

Have you ever heard of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog? I bet you think about it every day. It’s an oil painting made by Caspar David Friedrich, which clearly influenced that iconic moment in Breath of the Wild, when Links gets out to the open for the first time, the music soars, and the camera pans in to frame him standing mightily before Hyrule (even the game’s boxart seems a direct homage). In Echoes of Wisdom, this framing is a statement of intent: when Zelda gets to a similar hill, stands before Hyrule, and the title screen appears, the game is pledging to honor Breath of the Wild’s design philosophy, where the solution to each puzzle is open-ended, where we’re given a set of very flexible tools and are supposed to play around with them, finding creative ways to solve problems.

Echoes can be incredibly versatile. Take the old bed we find early on: it can serve as a simple platform for Zelda to jump on and reach higher places. But it can also be used for stealth, blocking the enemies’ line of sight. It floats, too, so we can use it to safely traverse dangerous bodies of water. And we can, of course, sleep on it to continuously recover health, even during the most hectic of circumstances, such as boss fights: Echoes of Wisdom doesn’t let silliness get in the way of player expression, so we can finally use beds the way they were always intended – stacked on top of each others’ edge to form bridges.

When Tri saves Zelda from prison, there’s a stealth section where we must escape the guards unnoticed. Usually, in games not directly designed for them, stealth sections are clunky segments that serve only to offer a temporary novelty and break up the pace (such as in Ocarina of Time). But here, echoes turn these sequences much more interesting, to the point where an entire stealth game could have been design around the mechanic: just in this initial segment, Zelda can summon tables to help her get on top of wooden shelves and pass unnoticed by guards, or summon a pot to throw at a corner, making the soldiers move to check the noise, or stack our lovable multipurpose beds on top of each other to block the path a guard usually takes – and then laugh at his confusion. Imagine you’re there doing your usual patrols, when you turn around and see a wall made of beds where there was nothing just ten seconds before. Guard duty in Hyrule can be a tough, traumatizing gig.

And not just objects can be turned into echoes, but enemies too, after we defeat them for the first time. After that, we can summon the likes of lizalfos, wizzrobes, and even sharks to fight by our side. Very early on, an attentive player may find a cavern with a powerful plant enemy with rotating spikes, called Cheesing the Early Game (their real name is Peahat, but only losers call them that). Cheesing the Early Game is guarding nothing of notice, because they are themselves the reward: powerful foes become powerful allies in Echoes of Wisdom. This is not a free party, however, so each echo comes with a cost attached – some are steep and the limit is well, very limited, at first. But this adds a bit of strategy to the proceedings: sometimes it’s better to summon four weaker monsters than a single powerful one, especially if the big one only attacks once from time to time. So, the overall loop is simple: we first explore the world to find powerful echoes and then we enter one of the game’s many dungeons to use those echoes…wisely (Yes, that sigh, exactly that sigh, hahaha yes).

If Echoes of Wisdom’s dungeon design can feel more akin to the classic ones it’s due to the isometric perspective, which restricts how much we can break the puzzles: in the Fire Temple in Tears of the Kingdom, for example, we could simply bypass the whole dungeon and never engage with its theme (using carts and rails) with our insane contraptions. But Echoes of Wisdom, with its many isolated rooms all covered with impregnable ceilings, gives us much less leeway to do that, even though each puzzle still has multiple solutions. The logic here is more about looking at our echoes as tools and then searching them for specific attributes: the game wants us to test which things can float, which things can burn, which things take out fires, and so forth. The tool we employ doesn’t matter, as long as it does the intended job.

The Echoes system would have been more than enough to build a whole game around, but Echoes of Wisdom goes one step beyond and also introduces the Bind ability, which allows us to bind Zelda to an enemy or object, making it follow our movements to the letter. There’s a statue on the other side of some bars near a button? Well, we can now bind ourselves to it and then move it around with Zelda until it lies on top of the button. This works with enemies, too, allowing us to keep throwing some of them into bottomless pits, which feels as gratifying as it sounds.

The Echoes and the Bind system would have been more than enough to build a whole game around, but Echoes of Wisdom – total madlad – goes one step further once again and introduces the Reverse Bind ability, where now it’s Zelda who follows the target’s movements. We can reverse bind Zelda with a moving platform to move alongside it, for example, or even use this with our own echoes: there’s a spider who likes to crawl upwards on walls, so if we reverse bind to them, we can follow them up a mountain. The sky is literally the limit.

Our dear friend Bob, the cynic, often complains that eventually having more than a hundred echoes available makes the act of finding them in the menu a big waste of time. Yes, sometimes it does, Bob. But usually, we are either using the echoes we just found or recently used, which are the quickest ones to reach in the list. We’re rarely looking for the echo in the middle of the list, Bob, and even then, it just takes some seconds, Bob. A recent patch also added the option to favorite echoes, which, granted, really should have been there from the start.

Echoes of Wisdom also excels when it comes to side activities. There’s the usual horse riding and chicken collecting and optional bosses, but also ones that push the game’s bespoke mechanics, such as collecting as many fruits as we can in the desert (we must use echoes that move fast and cover a lot of ground) or helping Dampé build robots by bringing him echoes with very specific traits. There are also the special challenges in Kakariko Village’s dojo, which presents unique scenarios and sometimes even has us beating them stripped of everything, from square one (like the famous Eventide Island in Breath of the Wild).

Some side quests are also quite creative, such as the one that has us searching for a fake soldier in the Hyrule Guard – an evil echo – and interrogating each one for clues. The little stories we come across while venturing through Hyrule are usually about these sinister doppelgangers, who rise to positions of power to spread fake news, or, as a character prefers to put it, “damaging untruths.” There’s intent behind their actions, then, so we begin to suspect that the rifts are not the natural random disasters people believe.

And Hyrule itself continues to be a whimsical place to explore, full of quirky places, items, and characters. There are patches of grass on the ground forming an arrow (pointing to a hidden reward), for example, a lake shaped like a heart where two lovers meet, an attire that allows us to speak with cats, and a Stamp Guy who really loves stamps and wants us to love stamps too, so he has us collecting several stamps throughout Hyrule because stamps are cool.

If the game has a serious problem – it’s not wasting time with menus, Bob, shut up – it’s that even though mechanically Zelda is totally distinct from Link, narrative-wise, the game makes her an equally silent hero. Zelda, however, has always boasted a strong, willful personality, which here is lost for no reason, robbing the game of a memorable protagonist: Echoes of Wisdom should have given her a voice, dialogue options, a dub, the whole shebang, instead of turning her silent precisely when she gained the spotlight.

Nonetheless, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom still does its titular character justice by delivering a unique, complex, and memorable adventure.

July 19, 2025.