The biggest shock of Tuesday The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom The reveal, of course, was that Princess Zelda would be a playable protagonist. The second biggest shock was that the game even existed and was being released in three months.
The third biggest shock took me a little longer to sign up, but it’s perhaps an even bigger problem: Echoes of wisdom is a clear sign that Nintendo has turned its back on what you might call traditional Zelda game design for good.
Tradition is deeply important to the Legend of Zelda series. This sequence of games basically told and retold the same story over and over again over the course of 38 Earth years (and millennia on Hyrule). Similarly, its game design was transformed and pushed within strict limits as it followed the time-honored rituals of Zelda.
For decades each game has opened up in a gradual, non-linear but carefully prescribed manner as the player unlocks new tools that fit like keys into the map’s many locks and uses them to find solutions to complex puzzles. In the first Zelda review I wrote — I think it was pro Mini cap, in 2004 — I described the games as “clockwork fairy tales,” meaning they functioned as beautiful, precise pieces of machinery that the player could plug into. And they stayed that way – until 2017.
Image: Nintendo
Breath of the Wild tore up the Zelda rule book. It provided players with all the most important tools at the beginning of the game and allowed them to explore the map in any direction and solve its challenges in any order. Through systems like weapon durability, weather, stamina, and cooking, he also added a lot of variables to keep players on their toes and encourage improvisation.
Then 2023 Tears of the Kingdom it overcrowded that approach with a handful of abilities that seemed designed to disrupt the game design rather than break it entirely. Ultrahand allows players to build their own furniture, buildings, vehicles and powertrains. Fuse fuses almost every single object in the game into a weapon system. Rewind allows players to send individual objects back in time. And Ascend — which started life as a debugging tool for developers — is an almost literal cheat, a get-out-of-jailbreak card.
With these two open world games Tears of the Kingdom in particular, series producer Eiji Aonuma and his team pushed the Zelda design paradigm towards openness and player creativity (up to a point). Those games were hugely popular, but—perhaps due to the accumulated cultural weight of the first three decades of Zelda games—I assumed that traditional Zelda would live on alongside this new strain, probably in smaller titles that returned to the series’ 2D roots. .
Apparently not. Introducing Echoes of wisdom Aonuma put it right in the video: “We wanted to create a new gameplay style that breaks the conventions we’ve seen in past Legend of Zelda games with a top-down perspective,” he said. Nintendo isn’t done playing with its beloved franchise – or rather, letting players play with it and challenging its designers to keep up.
In the game, Princess Zelda can use a magical staff called the Tri Rod to create copies of objects, and even monsters, called Echoes. She can build stairs out of bed frames, summon Moblins to fight for her, or create free-standing water columns. In the video, Aonuma pointed out how battles or puzzle solving will play out for different players depending on the echoes they use. Echo’s ability is Princess Zelda’s Ultrahand; same as in Tears of the Kingdomthe ability to brute-force the game’s challenges, or step outside of the usual Zelda rules and work around them, is part of the game’s design and part of the fun.
Echoes of wisdom will be the first brand new Zelda game to come out since Link’s open world adventures shook up the series. Visually, it looks just like the 2019 remake of the 1993 classic Link’s Awakening, but design-wise it looks like it belongs in this other, newer breed of Zelda games. Embracing creativity and player freedom now seems to be a core tenet of the series. Aonuma’s Quiet Revolution Continues; Zelda will never be the same again.