The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

[Nester the Lark]

I'm surprised I didn't already make a thread for this, but I guess I haven't had much to say. I'll probably have more to discuss once I play the game.

Anyway, here are the first two parts of an Ask the Developer interview.

Of note, the director from Nintendo's side was Tomomi Sano, the first woman to be a director of a Zelda game. It's not mentioned if this had any significance with Zelda being the main character (it's suggested that the project started with Link as the main character), but perhaps that will be addressed in the next part.

But yeah, I'm looking forward to playing this game. I never did get around to playing the remake of Link's Awakening. The last top-down Zelda game I played was The Minish Cap*, which I played on the Wii U Virtual Console, so it's been a while.

* Not counting Cadence of Hyrule.

[Nester the Lark]

Here's part 3.

It seems that Zelda being the main protagonist and Tomomi Sano being the first woman director of the series is just coincidence. Link was originally planned to be the protagonist, but his sword-and-shield gameplay got in the way of the echoes, so they decided to replace him with another character. That combined with all the requests players have had to be able to play as Princess Zelda naturally led them to make her the protagonist this time.

Aonuma also makes some interesting comments about the lore. Kit & Krysta have remarked several times that Aonuma and the Zelda dev team don't really care about the lore or timeline, despite that some fans obsess over it. Aonuma seems to address that somewhat here:

Aonuma: These days, even for us, it's not easy to touch on the lore of the Legend of Zelda series. When you address the history of the Legend of Zelda, you naturally have to be conscious of how things have been expressed previously in the series. But when we think about a new game, we need to think about new developments while being mindful of the past games in the series, so the scope of what you can do becomes increasingly narrow if you think in the same way every time. On top of that, because the series has been running for a long time, players are interested in its history and lore. So, when we've adopted a game plot that was not in line with the other games in the series because we prioritized the gameplay, we've been told by our fans that it didn't make sense. We realized that even if the developers didn't intend to make nonsensical changes, players could interpret otherwise.

[Nester the Lark]

So, I've finished two dungeons and I'm in the third area, and so far, I'm quite enjoying the game!

But there's one thing I wanted to bring up. Because Zelda is the main character, this is a rare occasion to experience Link as a character from a third-person perspective. (Zelda's diary in Breath of the Wild provides a little bit of this, as well.)

Although he's mostly been missing from the game so far (aside from playing as him in the opening sequence), we get a little bit of backstory for him from other characters. They describe his personality, and even mention that he lost his ability to speak after disappearing into one of the rifts. One character even speculates that Link hopes to get his speaking ability back.

While I don't expect any major character revelations that dramatically alter how Link has been portrayed in the series, I'm looking forward to seeing how things play out with him.

[Nester the Lark]

I have finished The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. There's no in-game time, but the Switch's system timer indicated that I played for "30 hours or more," for whatever that's worth. I think most people played through the game faster than I did, but I spent a lot of time doing side content rather than just focusing on the main story. I haven’t done 100 percent, but I did do most of it as I went along.

Here are my thoughts:

Echoes of Wisdom manages to feel both traditional and unconventional at the same time. It's heavily influenced by A Link to the Past, particularly in the layout and content of the overworld, and it has traditional Zelda-style dungeons. But while there is a scripted sequence of events, there is still some non-linearity, as well as some of the open-world aspects from Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, and puzzles are built with that "create your own solution" approach.

Of course, the main new feature is that we get to play as Princess Zelda instead of Link, and it turns out to have much more significance than simply being an avatar swap. Basically, Echoes of Wisdom poses the question "what if instead of playing as a sword fighter, you were a summoner?" True to Princess Zelda’s role of representing the Triforce of Wisdom, the gameplay requires the player to be more cunning. While there is still plenty of action, it is decidedly more passive and strategic.

Also, while the story is fairly simple, I still found it to be satisfying, and experiencing it entirely from the perspective of Princess Zelda was more interesting than I was expecting.

In comparison to Tears of the Kingdom, Echoes of Wisdom is a much smaller, simpler game, but I think it also felt like a fresher experience. While Tears of the Kingdom is a great game, I think it's also an example that more is not always better, and I wasn't terribly fond of its crafting system. However, I really enjoyed collecting and experimenting with the Echoes in Echoes of Wisdom. The only real downside is how much of a slog the inventory system is, but at least I wasn't expected to be constantly gluing things together.

My only other issue is that there are three stealth sequences. Thankfully, they're not difficult, and they're fairly short.

Finally, I want to mention that the endgame was exactly what I had hoped Tears of the Kingdom's endgame would be:

Spoilers for the final parts of both games:

SPOILER: Click to show

In Tears of the Kingdom, given that Link is accompanied by other characters in each of the main dungeons, I thought maybe Zelda would be his companion in the final dungeon, and the two of them would work through it together. After all, the opening sequence where Link and Zelda are exploring the ruins together seems to foreshadow this. That turned out not to be the case, although technically Zelda does help Link in the final boss fight.

However, in Echoes of Wisdom, Zelda and Link do take on the final dungeon and boss fight together, providing support for each other. I loved how this played out, and I loved seeing their relationship established this way through gameplay.

I need to let Echoes of Wisdom sit with me for a while, but as of now, I think I appreciate it more than Tears of the Kingdom. It's not a grand epic like the "main" 3D Zelda games, but it was a more refreshing experience than Tears of the Kingdom's iteration on Breath of the Wild.