The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a 2024 top-down action-adventure game developed by Nintendo and Grezzo and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch, released on September 26, 2024.³¹⁸¹⁶ It is the first Nintendo-developed game in the series to explicitly star Princess Zelda as the main protagonist, a role typically reserved for Link.¹¹² Announced during a Nintendo Direct showcase on June 18, 2024, the game reached retail little more than three months later.¹⁷

The game opens where most Zelda games finish, with Link defeating Ganon; but just as he frees Princess Zelda, the usual hero is sucked through a rift into an alternate dimension, leaving Zelda to rescue Hyrule.⁵ Mysterious rifts appear across the kingdom, swallowing up people, objects, and even the King of Hyrule and Link.³¹⁶ Left alone, Zelda sets out with an ethereal creature called Tri, who grants her a wand known as the Tri Rod.³¹⁶

Gameplay

Rather than wielding a sword, Zelda’s principal tool is the Tri Rod, with which she creates imitations of objects and defeated foes called “echoes”.¹⁵ These include water blocks used as platforms, beds repurposed as bridges, tables to reach higher places, and enemies that will fight alongside her.¹³ According to IGN reviewer Tom Marks, defeating an enemy once lets Zelda summon it thereafter, and the number of echoes she can have active at one time is governed by an upgradable point system that starts at three.¹³ The game contains over a hundred distinct echoes, ranging from wooden crates, beds, blocks of water, and clouds to nearly every enemy in the game apart from the bosses.¹⁷ Producer Eiji Aonuma described the creations as imitations Zelda uses to save the people of Hyrule, and the team built numerous new ways to play around them.³

Tri also grants a “Bind” ability, which tethers objects so they follow Zelda’s movements — used, for instance, to shift a massive boulder from her path — and a “Reverse Bond” that instead makes Zelda mimic the movement of an object or creature, letting her fly, climb, or catch rides on fast-moving things.⁶⁷¹⁶ Bind can also unearth buried treasure and reposition troublesome enemies.⁶ When Zelda finds and picks up a mysterious sword, she takes on a time-limited “Swordfighter” form that lets her attack directly like Link; the sword’s gauge is replenished by collecting energy in the Still World.⁸¹⁰¹³

Zelda travels Hyrule on foot, via fast-travel waypoints she discovers on her journey, and on horseback, summoning her steed by creating a carrot echo, and she may keep multiple horses over the course of the adventure.⁶⁷ The world spans regions including a desert, wetlands, a volcano, and sparkling waters, populated by Zora, Goron, and Deku Scrubs.⁶⁷¹⁶ At smoothie shops Zelda combines collected ingredients into drinks that grant status effects such as heat and cold resistance, replacing the cooking of recent entries, and outfits and accessories grant enhanced abilities.⁶⁹ Quests given by the game’s characters are tracked in an Adventure Log.¹⁶ The engineer Dampe returns, crafting wind-up Automatons that fight for Zelda but break if they take too much damage.⁸¹⁰

The central new location is the Still World, reached through the rifts, where trees, land fragments, people, and objects float frozen in the void and are said to eventually vanish.⁸¹⁰ Each rift entry point leads to a location with its own defining features, and massive dungeons lie deep within, where Zelda uses echoes to traverse broken terrain, solve puzzles, and confront bosses.⁸¹⁰¹⁶ Marks estimated his playthrough at roughly 23 hours.¹³

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom — Overview Trailer — Nintendo SwitchNintendo of America

Development

The game was developed by Nintendo in collaboration with Grezzo, a studio founded in 2006 that had spent years producing remakes in the series, including The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and the 2019 Nintendo Switch remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening; Echoes of Wisdom was the first brand-new Legend of Zelda game Grezzo worked on.³ Series producer Eiji Aonuma served as producer, Tomomi Sano was the Nintendo-side director — the first female director of the Legend of Zelda series — and Satoshi Terada of Grezzo directed for the first time.³ Sano’s earlier work included the Grezzo remakes of Ocarina of Time 3D, Majora’s Mask 3D, and Link’s Awakening, as well as Twilight Princess HD, while Terada had begun on the Ocarina of Time remake and handled art style, 3D backgrounds, and lighting on Link’s Awakening.³

Aonuma said he had long wanted to establish a 2D top-down Legend of Zelda series separate from the 3D entries such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and that the Link’s Awakening remake had established a modern approach to the top-down experience on which something new could be built.³⁴ He noted that viewing the world from a top-down perspective feels completely different from the behind-the-character 3D view, and that the team wished to cherish that diversity within the series.³

Echoes of Wisdom borrows the diorama-like, toy-like art style of the Link’s Awakening remake.¹⁵¹³ Its freeform, sandbox puzzle-solving draws on the open-ended experimentation of Breath of the Wild and its sequel Tears of the Kingdom, while restoring the linear dungeon crawling and key-item progression of older 2D entries.⁵¹³¹⁷ Tri’s power to lift and move objects was likened by Marks to the Ultra Hand of Tears of the Kingdom.¹³ Reviewer Christopher Teuton noted the overworld map’s resemblance to that of A Link to the Past.¹⁷ The traditional sword-and-shield combat of the 2D line traces back to the original The Legend of Zelda of 1986.¹³

Zelda had previously been playable only in spinoffs such as the Hyrule Warriors games, the Super Smash Bros. series, and the rhythm game Cadence of Hyrule, and in spirit form during segments of 2009’s The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks.¹¹² Two earlier Zelda-starring titles, 1993’s Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and 1996’s Zelda’s Adventure, were developed for the Philips CD-i multimedia player by outside developers.¹¹²

Reception

Echoes of Wisdom received generally favorable reviews, holding a Metascore of 85 based on 124 critic reviews and a user score of 8.3 based on 1,280 ratings.¹⁸ IGN’s Tom Marks called it “far more than some second-tier spinoff,” describing a roughly 23-hour playthrough and praising how the echo system preserved a distinctly Zelda sense of key-item progression, though he found summoning echoes in combat less thrilling than swinging a sword as Link.¹³ ScreenRant’s Christopher Teuton called it his favorite Zelda game in eighteen years, particularly for players who missed the more linear pre-Breath of the Wild structure.¹⁷ Reviewers at Analog Stick Gaming were more reserved, faulting weak enemy AI, thin regional storylines, and the way a spiritual Link repeatedly comes to Zelda’s aid.¹⁴ Multiple reviewers criticized the cumbersome echo-selection menu and noted dropped frames in the overworld, especially in Hyrule Field.¹³¹⁴¹⁷

A Nintendo Switch Lite: Hyrule Edition system launched alongside the game on September 26, 2024.⁵¹⁶