I'm a huge Legend of Zelda fan. I love the adventuring and puzzle-solving aspects of the series. I have yet to play all the games, but I've played a sizeable chunk of them. They've even influenced my own storytelling! Ever wonder why I gave Aaron and Sabra marks on the backs of their hands and gave them their own phantoms to fight?
This year, Nintendo released Echoes of Wisdom for the Switch, which returned to a top-down, classic gameplay look. Prior to this, they had released the remastered version of Link's Awakening, and they reused several assets from their remaster. It almost seemed like it was a test-run for Echoes of Wisdom, and they made several improvements to the gameplay that I really enjoyed while still keeping some classic elements.
Something my brother asked me when I just got into the game was what the developers did to make Zelda irreplaceable, i.e. by Link. What makes her unique? This game impressed me by answering that question in several ways, and it made me appreciate just how much thought went into it!
The rest of this is partially a review, but mostly just a list of my thoughts on the story and the game mechanics.
For those who haven't played the game, there are spoilers ahead!
Zelda's Religious Role
One of the most pleasant surprises for me in this game was Zelda's role as a prophesied priestess that would help defeat Null, the primary protagonist of the game, alongside a hero. Other iterations of her have her simply as a princess or as a reincarnation of an ancient goddess, and I think the closest priestly role she had to this was in Skyward Sword. However, this game emphasized the religious role much more.
She fulfills her role in several ways. She wears sacred vestments that become her primary travel clothes in Act II and III of the game. She acts as an intercessor between her people and the goddesses, from who she receives Sanctions, or approval to access the Prime Energy (Triforce), and then performs a sacred ceremony to access that power.
Her father the king admits that while he doesn't want his precious daughter to be traveling in a world being endangered by Null, he is willing to let her go in order to save his people. He recognizes that her religious authority supersedes his kingly will, and he loves her enough to let her fulfill her role.
This was one of her most interesting roles in the entire series, and I love it!
Zelda's Feminine Role
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| I didn't quite capture this moment when I wanted. |
Most important about Zelda's femininity is her ability to create. She creates Echoes to serve her will, which echoes her potential motherhood and her role as a princess, who commands those beneath her. During her travels throughout Hyrule, she often acts in an almost motherly role by helping people fix not only problems related to the Rifts, but other often mundane issues. I could tell that the developers put a lot of effort to make each main quest and its characters meaningful, and its awesome to see Zelda take time to become part of people's lives and their "small" problems while she's trying to solve Hyrule's very large problem. It's what a monarch is supposed to be like to her people, and the developers nailed it.
Another huge symbol in the game is that of rebirth. At the beginning of the game, Zelda is trapped in a crystal, and she needs Link to crack it in order to free herself. This emergence from the crystal acts as a rebirth for Zelda, reborn after being caught by Null and not able to simply live as a princess anymore until Null is gone. In a stroke of visual poetry, Link is also caught in a crystal by Null at the end of Act I, and Zelda cracks the crystal near the start of Act III, and he is reborn not as the lone swordsman he once was, but as Zelda's partner in prophecy.
I love how they made Zelda a vulnerable hero. She isn't some girl-boss who relies on the same tools and strengths that a man would. She has to learn how to use her own powers to survive in a hostile world.
Zelda and Link
After Link helps Zelda escape her crystal prison, part of her main quest becomes to find him while she closes Rifts around Hyrule. He is ostensibly pursuing her as well, as he follows her to the end of Act I, whereupon Null imprisons him.
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| Fanart by yours truly. I was trying to capture the terror I felt fighting phantom Link the first time! |
When I first encountered phantom Link (the fake, "echoed" version of Link created by Null), he terrified me. I was new to creating Echoes, and all my efforts to fight this powerful swordsman were for nothing. I finally had to pathetically resort to throwing pots at him as he chased me around the room with a very sharp sword. I could only imagine how Zelda must have felt, not knowing if this was the same young man that had saved her, and now was trying to kill her. Later in the game, though, she recognized the real Link and did all in her power to save him.
Zelda becomes the caretaker for Link's equipment, and while she can draw on the masculine power of the swordfighter form, she cannot depend on it entirely, having to rely more on her Echoes. Before the final fight with Null, Zelda returns the equipment, sacrificing her swordfighter form as she trusts Link to fulfill that role. Again, she understands her role as priestess and his role as hero, and isn't willing to try to do both herself. In fact, this would be impossible, with the way they set up the final fight with Null. I love the feminine-masculine dynamic between these two characters, which gives so much more depth to the story.
In the final dungeon, Zelda has to help Link's AI navigate obstacles, again emphasizing their reliance on each other. Link's AI worked really well with whatever Echoes you threw at him to overcome an obstacle. I'm disappointed they didn't have more of this player-computer partnership in the rest of the game, and I hope the developers pursue this mechanic in future installments.
During the final phase of the fight against Null, Link desperately tries to protect Zelda while trying to defeat elements of the boss, so it's up to us as Zelda's controller to figure out how to fight alongside him, rather than making him do all the work! Again, another cool puzzle to solve, and a wonderful display of Link's heroic character.
The Enemy
Our main antagonist, Null, reminds me of a Lovecraftian, eldritch horror. It is sapient, but has a primal drive to consume until there is nothing. All the dungeon bosses have been created by this thing as corrupted Echoes, including Ganon. The way it works is that Null sucks people into the Rift, where they eventually fade away, and it replaces them with copies in the overworld. We never see the actual Ganon in the Rifts, implying that he's been killed by this thing. Is it any wonder it takes both Zelda and Link to defeat Null?
Null presents itself as a giant, corrupted form of a Tri, the glowing creatures in this game created by the goddesses to fix Rifts. It's also captured a bunch of Tri's friends. The final dungeon is pretty macabre because of this, as you can see all these little creatures absorbed into the walls and floors of a very organic-looking dungeon. Null uses the Tri creatures to create more echoes, morbidly copying Zelda's ability with the Tri Rod. Null is one of those villains that is mostly in the background, sending out servants to do its bidding, until you finally face it head-on, and it worked really well for this game.
The Story
The story is very straight-forward, easy to understand and follow. I was hoping the developers would take a cue from Link's Awakening when it came to story and gameplay, and they did a great job. It's fun, elegant, poignant, and not overly long and complicated.
I like to separate the game into three Acts. Act I, Zelda is the vagabond, as her father has been replaced and Null wants to kill her through the king. It closes with Zelda sealing the Rift beneath the castle, losing Link to Null, and saving her father. In Act II, Zelda learns of her prophesied role as a priestess to assist the hero, and she goes on pilgrimage to get the goddesses' Sanctions to access their power. It ends with her getting the last Sanction. Act III starts with her going to the mysterious forest to perform the sacred ritual that gives her access to the Triforce. However, phantom Zelda breaks the Triforce, and Zelda pursues it into a Rift, where she fights the phantom and frees Link. The real Link! Act III ends with the defeat of Null, sealing the ginormous Rift across Hyrule, Tri's farewell, and Zelda and Link returning to Hyrule.
I loved the return of a sidekick. Tri has personality elements from Fi and Midna, with its own self-interests and goals, but it comes to appreciate Zelda, and even learns some humanity from the princess. And it and its friends remind me of the forest spirits from Princess Mononoke, so that's a bonus.
Most of the side quests were quite enjoyable and made you do some work for them. I was happy at the scarcity of fetch quests among them.
One of my favorite characters is the Stamp Rally man, who appears at stamp stands throughout Hyrule. I joked with my boys that Zelda has a deeper relationship with him than with Link, as she interacts with him so much. He's funny, quirky, and he keeps hinting at his background but won't give it completely.
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| Not everybody treated Zelda as a hero :( |
His stamps made me laugh!
Several of the story elements made me laugh, gasp, and cringe in horror. Most video games don't give me so many feels, and I loved all of it. I think my largest disappointment was that they didn't do an animated opening like they did for the Link's Awakening remastered, but that's pretty minor compared to what the developers gave us!
Mechanics
The driving gameplay mechanic is, of course, the Echoes. While scrolling through the Echo menu can be tedious, it forces you to think. I'm not sure how else they could have done this with this particular mechanic without severely limiting it, and I appreciate how you can sort the menu and use the controller to scroll quickly to where you need to go. I loved having to think through the puzzles and use my Echoes wisely, but the puzzles weren't so hard that I left off playing from any frustration (an issue I had with Majora's Mask, unfortunately).
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| I can't count the number of times I lit Zelda on fire! |
I appreciated how they limited the inventory much more from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. The limited inventory made me think harder about what strategies to use when approaching a dungeon, such as which smoothies to make. I also liked how the smoothie-making process was very simple and straightforward, an upgrade from the complicated recipes in BotW and TotK. I enjoyed the simple upgrades you could get, such as the accessory upgrades with the Great Fairy; again the limit on it gave me a simple goal to attain, and they made the interactions with the Great Fairy meaningful as well.
Finding heart pieces was a fun and pretty simple process. You had to work just hard enough to find them, but not so hard that you couldn't quickly figure out how to get to them.
Setting
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| EoW leaned heavily into the side-view dungeon- crawling as well as the top-down dungeon sections, which added a great dynamic to the puzzle-solving. |
The dungeons were very fun as well, with simple puzzles that were both challenging and fun to solve. I enjoyed going through the dungeons so much that the end of the game felt abrupt, and I was left wondering "Aren't there anymore dungeons?"
Anywho, wonderful game. Fun to play, easy to understand, and I didn't have to grind hundreds of hours into it to get everything done that I wanted. I think I beat the game the first time in under 15 hours. Its simplicity and limits made room for a fun and meaningful game, and I look forward to playing through it again in the future!
(Screenshots belong to Nintendo and were used for the purpose of review.)
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