Unlike Princess Peach, waiting in a castle to be rescued from Bowser, Zelda has never been a damsel. She has always commanded magical power, even in the early days of the series, when she would enlist green-clad swordsman Link to save the kingdom. For the last couple of decades, since 2003’s Wind Waker, Zelda and Link have been something of a team; they are friends, companions, a powerful regent and her loyal knight. But still we, the players, have always taken Link’s role in the story. Echoes of Wisdom is Zelda’s first star turn in the series that bears her name. Sinister rifts have appeared across the kingdom of Hyrule, sucking its citizens inside, where whole slices of the landscape are stuck in suspended animation. Zelda can traverse these rifts, and close them – after conquering the dungeon inside.
The main difference between Link and Zelda is that Zelda can’t fight. Instead, with a magical staff, she can summon material “echoes” of real objects from thin air – which could be anything from a cut of meat to distract monsters, to crates and tables to construct towers and staircases. When you come across the usual Zelda selection of deceptively mild-looking monsters, you can simply conjure a spear-wielding Moblin or a few bats into existence to dispatch them for you. Or, failing that, you can manifest a pot and throw it at whatever’s menacing you.
The problem with this is that I actually wanted to fight. Summoning creatures and waiting for them to finish duking it out isn’t much fun, and neither is throwing rocks at fast-moving enemies. I appreciated that having no weapons did force me to think differently than I usually would in a Zelda game, but sometimes you just want to crack out a bow and get the job done. Developer Grezzo appears to have realised this, in that you can temporarily transform into a Link-like swordsman to attack things yourself with sword-slashes and arrows – but this is limited by a stingy energy meter, meaning you can rarely use it outside of boss battles.
This is not the only instance in which a complicated system is introduced to compensate for the limitations of a different complicated system. Summoning objects can’t get you through every puzzle, so Zelda can also telepathically move boulders and furniture around, a feature that I genuinely forgot about for a good couple of hours of playtime until I suddenly needed it again. She takes more damage than Link ever did because she’s unarmed, so I’d end up conjuring a bed every 10 minutes for her to rest in to recover hearts. Some echoes have very specific applications, such as the spider that can attach itself to the ceiling to create a rope of web for you to climb – and with 50 or 60 echoes in your library, remembering which ones are useful in certain situations feels like homework.
Scrolling through all the echoes to find the one you want is fiddly, too. I almost always felt there was some distance between me and the fun. Last year’s Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was fiddly, too, but in that game Link’s ability to move objects around and construct mad contraptions also came with an enormous amount of flexibility. It created new options for approaching almost any situation: faced with a chasm, you could mend a rickety bridge, construct one yourself from trees that you could chop down yourself, or build a flying machine to soar over it. Echoes of Wisdom aims for this, but does not achieve that same sense of possibility, and I often felt like I was fudging things. Instead of one elegant solution to each puzzle, arrived at through satisfying deduction, there are several inelegant ones arrived at through trial and error.
Here’s an example: I was stuck for ages trying to find a way across to a chest on a pillar in a patch of quicksand. The quicksand meant I couldn’t build a tower up to the top, and I couldn’t build a long enough bridge out of beds to get across. In hindsight, what I probably should have done was try to telepathically grab it and move it down. Instead, I summoned a bird and tethered myself to it, hoping it would eventually fly in the right direction to let me drop on to the pillar. It did work in the end, but took ages, and rather than feeling ingenious when I finally opened that chest, I merely felt annoyed.
I did get used to Echoes of Wisdom’s new way of doing things as time went by – but I didn’t love it. There’s lots to like about it; particularly the painfully cute toylike aesthetic, which makes Hyrule feel a bit like like a giant Polly Pocket, and Zelda’s adorable horse. It’s a good game, and its mishmash of intersecting ideas does bring something new to Zelda. But I hope that the next time we play as Zelda, it feels more empowering.
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