It’s time yet again for another outing in The Legend of Zelda series. After Breath of the Wild and its sequel upped the ante on the series’ capabilities in full 3D, now marks the return of top down Zelda after almost 11 years without a new entry in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. But it’s not a standard 2D romp around Hyrule, as this time we’re finally playing as the series’ namesake princess. Zelda’s first solo journey promises freedom and innovation to an old formula, but just how successful is it?
This Time, It’s Really Zelda’s Legend
After a brief prologue where you play as Link, Zelda quickly takes center stage as the main playable character of her journey across Hyrule. More than just having a brand new top down Zelda game, this is perhaps the largest point of interest for me and I think they did a great job at executing this. Even beyond changes in aesthetics and gameplay that may go along with this, taking Zelda’s perspective provides a fresh outlook on Hyrule as a whole. Although Link is still present and an important component of the story, you’re provided a new outlook on him thanks to not being in his shoes for once.
Though Echoes of Wisdom starts with a typical scrap between Link and Ganon, it’s unknown who either of them are to Zelda and company. We as viewers might know that this is standard fare, but the characters don’t, and that ultimately sprouts seeds for some effective twists later on. While I was at first not particularly interested in exploring yet another fairly standard version of Hyrule, in the end I think the game did just enough new for its story and world to feel fresh.
Adding on top of this are the return of several races across Hyrule who haven’t yet been presented in a top down game, as well as some returning ones. There’s the Gerudo Tribe, Gorons, both iterations of Zora, Deku Scrubs (who’ve been MIA for nearly 20 years), as well as new races like the Yeti. There’s also your usual main companion character in the form of Tri, a being tasked with fixing the rifts that are slowly swallowing up Hyrule. I would have preferred some brand new areas to reimaginings of the old ones, but overall this version of Hyrule is still packed to the lid with its charms.
If It Works, It Works
While most might envision top-down Zelda as a sort of lock-and-key game wherein you slowly open up the world through exploration and acquiring new items, Echoes of Wisdom dramatically shakes up the foundation. Once you clear the opening sequence, you’re pretty much free to go wherever you please. It’s not quite as open as Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom since you can’t bum-rush the final boss or do everything in any order you want. Rather, it’s more comparable to A Link Between Worlds, where you’re given a vast amount of choice in large segments. Unlike A Link Between Worlds, however, you’re still able to explore nearly the entire map at your leisure.
In previous Zeldas, players may remember moments where they see a Heart Piece that’s frustratingly out of reach because they don’t yet have the right item to get it. In The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, such frustrations are a thing of the past. You can do practically every optional challenge as soon as you see it. This is thanks to the game’s new ‘Echo’ system. With the power of the Tri Rod, Zelda can learn the Echo of many objects and enemies, allowing her to summon replicas of them to aid in her travels.
Echoes can range from beds to boulders to ice cubes to all sorts of things, and all come with their own rudimentary physics and chemistry. Beds with wooden frames will float upon water, while more expensive ones will sink right down. Ice cubes will melt against fire, and fire can spread throughout tall grass and set hiding enemies ablaze. This sounds like fairly standard stuff, but given the sheer number of Echoes throughout the game, it’s remarkable that it’s so detailed.
The big problem with Echoes is that they feel a mile wide, but skin deep. Despite the number of possible interactions you can have with puzzles and enemies, the simplest approaches will serve you well for a good 90% of the game, and I wish that were hyperbole. The remaining 10% are more involved, but these moments are so infrequent and scattered that it’s difficult to appreciate them. In general, the puzzles are just far too easy, both in the overworld and in the dungeons. Using a spider to crawl up a wall or using a bridge of beds to cross a gap will get the job done most of the time, which is problematic when so many of the puzzles are based around traversal.
So in spite of how impressive Echoes appear on the surface, I used a very small number of them throughout my playtime. While experimenting might be encouraged, I never bothered due to how cumbersome sorting through the Echoes in the menus felt. There’s a constant start-and-stop to the action that never feels very good. Although I praise the attempt at variety, the truth of the matter is that there’s no meaningful functional distinction between using a set of beds across a gap or using clouds or trampolines. Since the overworld and dungeons don’t offer enough meaningful friction for different items to shine, it wasn’t long before the moment-to-moment gameplay started to blend in.
Hyrule Again
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom offers up the biggest iteration of Hyrule seen in a top-down Zelda game. While there are no truly new and original regions to be seen, Echoes of Wisdom takes locations seen from previous 3D entries and makes them top-down for the first time ever. Most of them are taken from Breath of the Wild, with locations such as Lanayru Mountain, the Hebra mountain region, and the subtropical Faron region. Additionally, there’s the Eldin Volcano region from Twilight Princess and the Gerudo Desert from Ocarina of Time. These areas are all blended into a map that’s rather comfortable and familiar if you’ve played A Link to the Past.
Each area is fairly well-defined, featuring gimmicks that bring Echoes of Wisdom closer to the recent 3D games. The Faron Wetlands is lush with man-eating plants that have to be dodged or set ablaze, meanwhile sandstorms in the Gerudo Desert will obstruct your vision and send tumbleweed flying. One of my favorite moments was actually the climb through Mt. Lanayru and Hebra Mountain, as freezing temperatures constantly forced the player to carry around a source of warmth. It became a careful, tense balancing act between fighting off enemies, collecting loot, and making sure I didn’t succumb to the cold. Out of all the locations in Echoes of Wisdom, that was where I felt its systems aligned the best.
As is typical for Zelda, Hyrule also plays host to a large number of collectibles, treasures, side quests, and minigames. You’ve got things like fruit harvesting and acorn collecting, as well as horse racing. These are decently fun, but the reward for them feels far more insubstantial compared to past games. What would have been a Heart Piece or expansion to inventory in the past is now some fruit to make smoothies, which can be found anywhere, or it’s a piddly amount of rupees as a reward; it’s not much and can make otherwise fun activities feel a bit deflating. The same applies to treasure chests, which contain things like Golden Eggs and more items to make smoothies with. While these are supposed to be rare, these repeat rewards become routine, so it becomes a case of having too much of a good thing.
That leads into my main issue with Hyrule this time around: it’s not big, it’s bloated. Whereas past top-down games were compact and brisk in their offerings, with Echoes of Wisdom I’m left searching more often for meaningful contents. The size of the map may have increased, but the substance has been stretched thin as a result. Now the world feels filled with broadly useless knicknacks that feel like they only exist to make sure the player gets some kind of reward. At best, it’s kind of nice, but at worst it greatly detracts from the sense of fantasy that Zelda normally gets right. It’s game-ified in all the ways the series normally deftly avoids. Elements of the world that normally leave me invested instead expose Hyrule’s artificiality.
Rifts and The Still World
Scattered all throughout Hyrule are large rifts in spacetime, which have swallowed up whole chunks of land and everyone unfortunate enough to be caught in them. Along with her companion Tri, Zelda is tasked with repairing these rifts from the inside out. The inside of these rifts are what’s called The Still World. As the name suggests, anything caught in The Still World is “stilled”, frozen in place and trapped until they disappear entirely or are freed by Zelda. This includes people who’ve had the life sucked out of them, chunks of land that are broken and displaced, and streams of water that defy gravity.
Unfortunately, unlike what the name might imply, The Still World isn’t a secondary world like The Dark World or Lorule from previous games. These are instead bite-sized chunks where you navigate each rift to rescue some of Tri’s friends, after which the rift is repaired and you’re back to business as usual. These sections started off well enough, but they quickly became an exercise in the routine once I realized that the objective was always the same and the difficulty of these sections never increased. From beginning to end, problems could always be solved just by building a bridge out of beds or something, and it stopped being all that engaging.
Here is also where combat takes a bigger focus, and it’s similarly a mixed bag. To give praise first, Echoes of Wisdom has a truckload of different enemies. Some even grow stronger depending on where you are, so the game’s already excellent difficulty curve is given more time to shine. Bosses in particular are where I feel Echoes work best, as they’re part of the few occasions where I have to critically think about how I improvise. There’s a lot of dynamic interaction at play here that’s impressive, but there’s one damning element that risks spoiling all of it: the pacing.
Combat in Echoes of Wisdom is dirt slow since Zelda cannot manually attack under normal circumstances. While she has limited access to Link’s sword, arrows, and bombs, they are just that—limited. Zelda is otherwise forced to use item Echoes or Echoes of enemies to deal damage, which can be a massive pacebreaker. Using Echoes of enemies is slow because they attack slowly and the damage they deal is usually quite low, meaning it can take as many as ten strikes to beat some of the more basic enemies. Using Echoes of items can encourage craftiness, but having to sort through the menu of Echoes I’d gathered felt cumbersome. By the time I had upgraded everything for combat to operate at a more comfortable pace, I was on the final dungeon. The end result is that I wound up avoiding enemies whenever I could for the vast majority of my playtime.
Dungeons
Traditional lock-and-key dungeons make their return in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and there’s a solid amount of them to go around this time. After completing certain objectives in the main story, a path to The Still World opens up where you can tackle one of the main dungeons and restore a key location in Hyrule. It’s good to have these more traditional dungeons back after Breath of the Wild and its sequel did something different with them, but I’m afraid to say that the dungeons here are below the series’ previous standards.
Firstly, the theming to these dungeons just isn’t very creative for the most part. A dungeon’s visual characteristics are among the most important parts of keeping it memorable for me, and Echoes of Wisdom’s are almost entirely uninspired in this department. Each dungeon is some combination of ruins and a particular element of where it’s located. “Ruins with sand”, “ruins with ice”, “ruins with fire” seem reductive, but that really is just about all I can describe these dungeons as. The closest we get to breaking away from this is the Gerudo Sanctum which features a pyramid. Even then, this is only ever used as insubstantial set-dressing rather than something that adds to its character or story.
It’s a far cry from the more out-there ideas you’d see from Zelda dungeons in the past, and its issues don’t just stop at looks, but design too. Dungeons here are all aggressively linear and you’re never really given a chance to pick where you want to go. Although there are a lot of puzzles, they’re oftentimes heavily isolated from each other. You solve one puzzle and then immediately move onto the next, or maybe you’ll do an encounter with some enemies instead. The issue with this is that it ultimately makes dungeons not feel very distinct from what you’re getting up to elsewhere in the game.
Puzzles in a more curated environment are well and good, but what really made dungeons click in the past was that they asked the player to think on a bigger scale. They asked for you to think about where you were relative to the rest of the environment, which halls lead to where, and what crafty methods could be used to get to where you needed to go. Those factors really led to dungeons in those games not feeling just like levels in a game, but tangible places that existed in a world. Echoes of Wisdom’s dungeons just wind up feeling like levels, despite all good intentions. They’re certainly not bad, but they don’t leave a strong impression.
Visuals, Performance, and Music
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom uses a refined version of the artstyle found in Link’s Awakening Remake. I’m not much of a fan of this since I don’t think the toylike aesthetic really fits Zelda that well, but for what it is it looks nice. Characters are well-modeled and environmental details are always conveyed clearly. This time around there’s an added level of detail to environments that makes it feel just a bit more alive. Grass sways in the wind, water is given depth beneath the surface, and sand and snow leave footprints with varying levels of volume as well. These details don’t make me love the artstyle, but they are improvements undoubtedly. The Still World in particular can be quite striking and atmospheric, especially during big story beats.
Next to the graphics, the music is equally important in conveying this heightened atmosphere. I really don’t have any notes for improvement here, it’s wonderful stuff. It’s a combination of the upbeat, heroic tunes of classic Zelda games and the more modern, ponderous music seen in Breath of the Wild. Each town theme uses instruments carefully picked to communicate its culture, and there are many bespoke songs for events both big and small. Despite my earlier complaints, it does a good job making even insignificant events feel important. Dungeon music in particular gets high marks, with strong yet atmospheric melodies. The closer you get to confronting the boss, the more layers are added to instrumentation as tensions heighten. It’s fantastic stuff.
There’s unfortunately one damning factor that spoils all of this: performance. Link’s Awakening Remake was similarly bereft of a stable framerate, but it’s only gotten worse here. While the target is 60FPS, it pretty much only ever runs at that when in small indoor areas. While inside dungeons and especially when exploring the overworld, expect the framerate to plummet below 30FPS regularly. It occasionally got so bad that it would sometimes freeze for an entire second before things boot back up again. During boss fights, frames will also plummet when a boss uses a special attack that has a lot of special effects. There’s also a nasty, blurry filter applied to the top and bottom of the screen when in most areas. Sure, the Switch was never a powerhouse, but things really shouldn’t be this shaky.
Verdict
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is an ambitious change to an old formula that’s stifled by a lot of growing pains. It’s still a decent game, but they wound up pushing the formula too far in some areas, and not far enough in others. The end result is an experience that’s stuck in a rather awkward middle ground. It’s still Zelda, so expect a lot of polish (besides performance) and charm, but this time it felt as if it came at the cost of some much-needed substance. I’m happy that 2D Zelda is finally back, but it’s clear that there’s a lot more work to be done for this format to reach its full potential.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: ECHOES OF WISDOM IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another Zelda game, you might want to check out our review of last year’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Or if you’re interested in a different action game on the Switch with a charming aesthetic, check out Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2.
Many thanks go to Nintendo for a Switch review code for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

A hobbyist who took up the pen to write about their favorite pastime: games. While a lover of many genres, Isaiah Parker specializes in Platformers, RPGs, and competitive multiplayer titles. The easiest way into his heart is to have great core gameplay mechanics. Self-proclaimed world’s biggest Sonic fan. Follow him @ZinogreVolt