The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Switch) review "There's wisdom in trying something new."

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom came out of nowhere, I felt like, but it quickly produced a lot of excitement among the community for one simple reason: people would finally get the chance to play as Zelda herself. The resourceful princess had already done a lot of heroic things throughout the long history of the franchise. But she hadn’t been cast in the starring role on a Nintendo platform. That made this release a big deal, even with the Switch heading into its twilight years.

I wasn’t impressed.

Ladies and gents have been saving the world in video games for ages. If Zelda’s debut as playable hero didn’t rock, I was completely prepared to say so. I typically don’t play games for their story or character design, anyway. I play them for their other mechanics. Most of all, I play them to get whisked away from contemporary concerns for a few minutes or hours. And it turns out The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a pretty good whisker.



The game begins about the way you might expect: with Hyrule facing grave danger. Link rises to the challenge once again, except this time he gets pulled into a rift for his trouble. Just before he vanishes, he weakens a crystal that has enslaved Zelda. The princess escapes and sets about saving everyone with the help of a plucky spirit named Tri. Together, the pair will defeat numerous enemies and overcome surprising challenges as they discover secrets about the rifts… and Hyrule itself.

It’s pretty standard fare, in a series that has featured rifts and alternate dimensions and time loops and prophecies and so on and so forth. Echoes of Wisdom doesn’t break new narrative ground so much as it goes back over the highlights while adding just enough twists to make the familiar ground interesting all over again. I’ve never been huge on lore, but I was happy to see nods to prior games in the series, dating all the way back to the original classic. Numerous moments reminded me of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, including the area around the graveyard at the base of the mountain, and the Eastern Palace. But there were other neat nods, like a meeting with an eccentric inventor, or a hike in the snow-covered Lanayru mountain range, or even a visit to a heart-shaped lake in a remote location.

As a princess, Zelda isn’t typically ready to head into the fray the way Link might. And this remixed version of Hyrule isn’t half as expansive as what recent installments have provided. I had my concerns, since I’ve always loved the thrill of roaming a sprawling landscape while besting monsters with my puny little sword. If the developers expected me to smile about losing some of my favorite elements, they were in for a rude awakening. Fortunately, they expected no such thing. The world is packed with secrets, and combat is still central to the Zelda experience.



From nearly the very start of the game, Zelda comes equipped with her magic rod. With help from the spectral Tri, she can use it to master new spells known as “echoes.” Some of these don’t seem all that remarkable. She can craft a bed out of thin air, for instance, or a rock. Other echoes have more obvious applications. For example, she can reproduce nearly every enemy in the game, after defeating them for the first time in battle. The bestiary is quite impressive, actually, with enemies appearing from each major installment in the series. These monsters are Zelda’s army, because she can summon as often as she likes… but only a handful at a time.

A typical battle thus involves Zelda stumbling across nasty foes and quickly finding a vantage point that might let her safely direct an echo or two. Perhaps she is in the Zora Domain and she needs to get past some Octorocks firing at her from the water. Quickly, she produces a flying Wizrobe and directs him to torment the villains from a distance. Then all she has to do is avoid the monster’s attempts to end her while her ally circles in the air and rains down electrical blasts. It’s surprisingly satisfying.

Hyrule is an interesting place, in part because the overworld map is designed in such a way that you can’t navigate it without echoing a variety of objects. Zelda may come to a high cliff face, for instance. To scale it and collect some loot at the top (or to reach a new region), she has to get creative in ways that recall Tears of the Kingdom and its instruments… but with fewer steps involved. Here, it’s easy to whip out a platform and ride it up the wall without having to refill energy meters or gather parts. Or, she might build a staircase out of beds or boulders or end tables. I was worried the mechanic would get tedious in a hurry, or that I would find one simple trick and rely on it most of the way through the game without having to stretch my puzzle-solving muscle. And while it’s true that the aforementioned bed is fiendishly useful a lot of the time, there are some areas where it just won’t work and other efforts must be made.



Although Zelda relies mostly on her wand, there are moments where she can also wield more traditional weapons for limited skirmishes. However, there’s a meter that rapidly drains. She can only rely on brute force occasionally. It feels like the right call. And it’s not as limiting as the weapon degradation in Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild. You can typically refill your meter fairly easily by defeating a few enemies with your echo army. As an added bonus (sort of), the shift in focus leads to a Zelda experience that feels surprisingly difficult in places.

No, I’m not saying the game is trying to take the crown from Dark Souls or some such nonsense, but neither is it a total cakewalk. The various rifts you’ll visit often must be thoroughly explored, and the only way to do that is to get up close and personal with powerful monsters, or to find creative ways to cross wide gaps or scale imposing cliffs. I got “Game Over” screens a handful of times on my adventure, which was not a familiar sensation. Fortunately, checkpoints are placed generously to avoid causing much frustration. If you plan to have your young child play the game, you might want to be prepared to help them through some confounding areas, unless they’re very comfortable solving puzzles. This is definitely not Zelda on easy mode, the way trailers made me think it might be. Some of the dungeons had surprisingly clever puzzles that required ingenious use of one echo or another. I’m pretty sure most of the toughest puzzles have multiple solutions. I just enjoyed experimenting to see if I could break them. To me, the dungeons felt about on par with the ones in A Link Between Worlds.

So, that’s all the stuff Echoes of Wisdom does right. What does it get wrong?



For me personally, the biggest issue was the interface. Its shortcomings weren’t apparent at the start of the adventure, when I only had access to a handful of echoes. By the end of the adventure, though, I could produce dozens and dozens of companions and objects. This process begins as you press a button to bring up a menu. Then you have to scroll along a horizontal bar to select the echo that is right for the current situation. Making selections can eventually get tiresome, even with sorting options you can readily switch between. It’s not unbearable by any stretch of the imagination, but it adds to the frustration if you’re feeling stumped or if you just can’t remember which echo you wanted and so you must sort through piles of them.

When I saw first footage of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, I wasn’t convinced it would be the amazing new 2D installment fans have deserved for such a long time. I didn’t mind the idea of playing as Zelda, but I would have been equally pleased with another Link-led outing. The game had to do more than offer me a hero in a dress. It had to provide a rousing adventure to win me over. And over the course of a couple dozen enjoyable hours, that’s precisely what it did. I suggest giving it a proper chance yourself. You’re unlikely to regret it.

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Staff review by Jason Venter (October 05, 2024) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.