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According to Nintendo Life, the Saudi PIF's investment in Nintendo has actually been decreasing in recent months. It is now down to 6.3 percent.

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately, so in the interest of conversation, I wanted to bring something up.

As with the past couple of Ys games, Ys X includes options during conversations allowing you to choose how Adol responds to certain things. It doesn’t affect the story or affinity with other characters; it’s merely for flavor and to let players shape Adol’s personality to a degree.

But I was thinking about how I have a certain mentality for choosing how to respond, and it’s the same for other games with similar conversation choices, like Xenoblade 1 and 2.

It actually goes back to the game Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, which I think might be the first video game I played that had conversation choices of this type. In that game, the purpose of the choices was that it affected the other characters’ morale, which in turn affected their performance during the combat sections of the game. So ideally, you want to pick the choice that would raise their morale so that they fight better. (Interestingly, the writing was clever enough that there was actually a difficulty curve to it. The choices got more ambiguous and difficult the further you got in the game.)

So because of that, my mentality has carried forward into other games with conversation choices. In Ys, I try to pick the option that’s more encouraging for the other characters. It makes Adol’s personality seem warm and empathetic, which I like.

Oh my...



Well, at this point, I thought it would likely be for the Switch successor, but no complaints from me!

EDIT: It includes new story elements, according to Nintendo.

I have not played the original, but I've heard that it ends on a cliffhanger, so perhaps this is intended to wrap that up.

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:



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.

Bump.

Shutaro, the director of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and who also worked on several Castlevania games, has been diagnosed with cancer. He is stepping away from work on the sequel.

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.

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: