The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a top-down action-adventure game from Nintendo that’s been highly anticipated since its reveal in June earlier this year. It’s also the first mainline series The Legend of Zelda game to feature Zelda herself as the playable protagonist.



Some minor story spoilers lie ahead so avert your eyes for the next three paragraphs if you don’t want to know anything about the start of the game.

The story kicks off with Link, clad in a hooded cloak, venturing out into a dungeon. Fast forward a little bit and suddenly you’re face-to-face with a dastardly-looking pig enemy with Zelda trapped inside a crystal floating behind him. After a tough battle against your formidable foe, a mysterious rift opens up in the ground and swallows Link whole.



Before Link gets pulled in though, he manages to fire off a singular arrow that cracks the crystal Zelda is trapped in. This allows Zelda to break free and she escapes from the dungeon while the rift expands and consumes everything within.

The introductory sequence of the game takes a little while to get going with its story onboarding but once it does, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom truly excels. Zelda escaped the dungeon but Link’s gone. When the princess returns to Hyrule Castle to tell the King about what just happened, another rift opens up and swallows him and his two closest allies. This time however, the rift spits out evil copies of all three and Zelda gets imprisoned. All seems to be lost but while in prison, Zelda encounters a mysterious creature known as Tri who bestows upon her the Tri Rod.

This is where the game really gets going and Zelda is in for the adventure of a lifetime. Together with Tri, you’ll learn how to summon echoes of objects and make your escape. Along the way you’ll encounter Impa who tells you to visit a specific area in Hyrule and seek help. Zelda and Tri will puzzle platform their way across Hyrule and without spoiling too much further, the story involves a lot of classic The Legend of Zelda elements while incorporating aspects seen in the more recent Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom too.



Zelda can effectively summon copies of certain objects and place them in the world using the Tri Rod and Tri’s power. Once you defeat an enemy, you can also summon copies of them to do your bidding too. Using echoes is essential to progressing through the story of the game since they will help you to traverse the environment and solve puzzles. As the game goes on, Tri also becomes powerful and you gain access to more of his abilities such as the ability to grab objects in the world and interact with them by moving them around.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom features both a top-down viewpoint and a side-scroll 2D view in certain areas. The game is predominantly top-down with the 2D areas interspersed throughout. This blend of gameplay keeps things fresh and the puzzle solving in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is truly remarkable.



Thanks to Zelda and Tri’s ability to summon copies of objects, you can solve puzzles in a variety of ways. For example, in an early area, once you’re able to make a copy of a spider enemy, you’ll be able to use a copy of the spider to spin a web which you can climb. You can use this web to reach higher platforms or alternatively, you can just place a table and a box next to each other to create your own makeshift staircase to reach the higher platform. As the game goes on and you gain access to more echoes, the combinations and subsequently your ability to puzzle-solve becomes exponentially more creative and complex.

It's incredibly fun coming up with different ways to puzzle platform your way through Hyrule in search of Link and a solution to the rift problem. The sheer pure unadulterated joy you’ll feel after successfully solving a puzzle is unmatched in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and even boss enemies feature mechanics which can be approached from different gameplay elements and playstyles.



Later on in the game, Zelda will also gain access to Link’s sword and this introduces a more traditional action mechanic to the game which isn’t reliant on summoning echoes. However, it comes with a catch. This being an energy meter which limits your sword usage so you can’t just swordslash everything to death like you would if you were Link. This blend of using echoes and your sword provides another layer to the gameplay in addition to using summoned enemies and Tri’s own grabbing powers. It’s so seamlessly incorporated into the gameplay that before you know it, you’ll be combining echoes and other abilities in no time, taking out enemies and exploring rifts.

While adventuring through the “Still World”, i.e: where the rifts lead, I couldn’t help but think of all the various combinations that players will be coming up with to solve puzzles and get past tough enemies. The boss battles are also fantastic and provide quite a challenge at some points but never to the point of frustration. The gameplay difficulty and learning curve is perfectly balanced with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom easing you into its mechanics.



The soundtrack in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is fantastic with the overworld theme being amazing as expected. The themes that play in the various areas of the game are also great and the sound effects used throughout the game are very well done.

The overall story of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is also extremely well done here with the NPC characters really shining through with their personalities. You’ll want to explore more and learn more about the game world and it’s very rewarding talking to characters who will give you tidbits of lore and background story.

Graphically, each area in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom looks fantastic and the cuteness of the character designs is very visually appealing. It features the “Retro-Modern” toy-like art style that was used in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening which I really liked when that game released. If you played Miitopia a few years ago, the character designs feel slightly reminiscent of that too but lean towards a more detailed chibi design philosophy that’s a lot better.



The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has so much to offer and if I state any more it would honestly be doing a disservice to you as the reader and gamer and ruin some of the game’s best surprises. I will, however, say that each person’s journey throughout this game will be entirely different based on how they use their echoes and how they play as Zelda herself. If you think of the mechanics as a smoothie, this is one extremely tasty smoothie. And speaking of which, Zelda herself can make smoothies in the game which have various effects on her thus taking this analogy one step further.

The only minor gripe I have with the game lies with the fact that sifting through echoes in the late game becomes a bit of a messy affair since there’s so many available. The lock-on system is also a tad bit cumbersome in action since you can lock onto your own echoes too but for the most part, this is manageable throughout the game once you get used to it.

Overall, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a truly fantastic mainline Legend of Zelda game and one where putting Zelda front and center as the protagonist feels like an extremely clever design decision. She’s very clearly differentiated from Link and the summoning mechanics and use of echoes will lead to varied gameplay that will keep you coming back for the entirety of the roughly 25 hour-long story. If you own a Nintendo Switch, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a must-play title.

*Switch code provided by Nintendo