Echoes of Wisdom: A Swordfighter’s Guide for the Open World of Zelda and the Princess Eiji Aonuma
Echoes of Wisdom, launching September 26 for the Switch, is Zelda’s first game in the leading role. When Nintendo announced the game in June, Legend of Zelda stalwart Eiji Aonuma said that the goal was to “create a new gameplay style that breaks conventions seen in the past.” In other words, a new way for Zelda to step out of the damsel role and into her own power.
It was surprising that Zelda picked up Link’s sword and gained the ability to fight and dress his way through the game. In her swordfighter form, Zelda’s more nimble and able to block attacks using a magically manifested shield. If you leave a magic meter running too long it will quickly deplete it, and that’s what Zelda’s transformations are for. When I first start playing the game, I knew that as powerful a swordfighter as zeds was, but it was not something I could just default to. The sword is important, but it isn’t the only tool you should use to overcome the multiple challenges of the game.
When I got into the open world, I realized that brute force wasn’t the best way to play. Even though it doesn’t take much to knock out Nintendo, you have to be careful with how you deploy echoes and use your imagination to avoid incoming attacks. Because your echoes sustain damage, you need to be prepared to make new ones at the right time in order to destroy difficult enemies. But the princess does have some other options at her disposal.
Breath of the Wild: Exploring Hyrule with Echoes of Wisdom and Link’s Misleading Hero, Princess Zelda, and Tri Rod
The number of echoes you can create depends upon the number of triangles floating behind Tri and a point system that assigns different costs to things you can create. While a table echo costs a single triangle, a Moblin echo requires two. The game requires you to think about what you’re doing when battles get more complicated because the game will automatically wipe out old echoes in the order you created them.
Even though the puzzles I played through were fairly simple, there were a few ways they could have been solved using different echoes. One approach might make other characters behave in a certain way that opened up a previously barricaded path, and another method might give me a completely different route to take. Some of that variability comes from the way that echoes interact with their environments by default — one monster, for example, immediately started hopping around and setting things on fire after I called it out. But much of it boils down to the way Echoes of Wisdom encourages you to experiment.
Every Legend of Zelda game has had its quirky innovations, but Breath of the Wild revolutionized the franchise in ways that felt monumental and reflective of Nintendo being ready to try something — a number of things, really — new with Link. Breath of the Wild’s openness made its take on Hyrule feel unlike anything we’d ever seen from the series, and its story brought Link to life by building a big, rich world around him that you were meant to spend hours exploring.
After years of waiting on the sidelines while Link hacked and slashed his way through Hyrule, Echoes of Wisdom turns Princess Zelda into the hero as she sets out to stop Ganon. The first time we meet this Zelda, it is clear that she knows how important Link is in the grand battle between light and dark and that she is familiar with the dangers that Ganon poses. With Link and many other hylians being swallowed up by a strange portal, Zelda left to her own devices to keep her kingdom from falling into total chaos.
By waving the Tri Rod at certain objects and defeated monsters, Zelda and her companion Tri can create duplicates of them called echoes. When I first played my demo, the echoes I heard were like a small table and a bed in a top-down Nintendo game. The echoes give you a variety of ways to tackle the Echoes of Wisdom puzzles. A single table doesn’t seem like much at first, but a stack of them is perfect for getting Zelda up high enough to sneak out of a prison cell. Being able to climb into a pot is very helpful in instances when she needs to hide.
The first part of the demo included Zelda’s escape from prison, where she’s just beginning to learn how to make echoes, and spilled over into a small portion of the game’s overworld. I learned how to bounce a trampoline onto rooftops when I was in a small village. I created a spiky ball enemy to use as a battering ram on other foes in the field. It was the second half of the demo, however—a small dungeon complete with boss-fight—that felt the most satisfying.
The remake of Link’s Awakening looks similar to the Nintendo Wii game Tears of the Kingdom, but it is closer to being an inventive sequel to that game. After more than an hour in the game during a recent demo, we found Echoes of Wisdom to be a playground of puzzles where everyone is in charge of their own adventure.
Rifts, Revelations and Princess Zelda in the Presence of a Dynamical Doomsday Nightmare
Princess Zelda has to escape from jail. She was sentenced to prison over her involvement in the appearance of mysterious rifts. She would be stuck there until Link could come and rescue her.