The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom review for Nintendo Switch

In my mind, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is sort of like a companion piece to Princess Peach: Showtime! from earlier this year. Both, after all, allow the female main character from a decades-old Nintendo franchise to finally take centre stage – though, obviously, in Peach’s case it had only been a few decades since she starred in Super Princess Peach, whereas Echoes of Wisdom is Zelda’s first time getting to be something more then a damsel in distress. And in both cases, the results are excellent: I loved Showtime! six months ago, and I love Echoes of Wisdom today.

Where the two games contrast with each other, though, is in their approaches. Showtime!, after all, played nothing like your standard Mario game, and instead found Peach starring in a game that jammed together all kinds of different genres. Echoes of Wisdom, by comparison, looks and plays very much like it belongs in the same universe as Link’s Awakening or A Link Between Worlds. To some extent, you could probably swap Link into this game, and I don’t think many people would bat an eye. Obviously, the fact that Mario has starred in such a wide variety of games compared to Link was probably a factor in how the two games came to be, and the fact that both Showtime! and Echoes of Wisdom are excellent means the contrast can only go so far, but it’s nonetheless interesting to consider.

However you want to look at Echoes of Wisdom, though, there’s no denying that it’s enormously fun. In large part, this comes down to the fact that it allows you an incredible amount of freedom. After an opening chapter where the game holds your hand through a couple of cutscenes that feel like they drag on forever, a whole giant map basically opens up for you and leaves it up to you where you want to go and how you want to do things.

There are some circumstances, I imagine, where that kind of freedom could be overwhelming – at least, I know that that’s often my complaint when it comes to open-world games. Here, though, that freedom plays into Echoes of Wisdom’s core mechanic: Zelda has a wand that allows her to make duplicates of all kinds of things – both living and inanimate – and she can use those to take on the world however she wants. It means that there’s no one way to solve a puzzle or take on an enemy, and the game allows you to take on those challenges however you see fit.

In my case, it meant that I kinda, sorta turned Zelda into a sadistic arsonist. One of the enemies she faces early on in the game is basically a little ball of flame. I can’t remember how I defeated it in the first place, but I know that from that point on, it was my go-to solution to everything. Fields of grass that might have rupees hidden within? Go scorched earth – literally! – by burning it all down. A single enemy blocking your path? Sneak up behind them and set them on fire. Groups of enemies surrounding you? You better believe I was setting everything on fire as quickly as I could.

Even when I wasn’t using fire as a solution to all my problems, I was still quite enamoured with how much freedom Echoes of Wisdom gave me to solve puzzles and get around the world. You can block enemies in by cornering them with beds, you can stack beds like stairs to reach higher levels, you can drop a bed on someone’s head in some of the game’s 2D dungeons…and, naturally, you can use a bed for a quick nap if you’ve just had an intense battle and need to restore a few hearts.

You can probably tell my one criticism of Echoes of Wisdom, too: it can become very easy to rely on the same items over and over again. Even though the game gives you a wealth of items to choose from – after all, you can clone any of the enemies you defeat, and a good number of inanimate objects, too – it can be a bit of a hassle to sort through them all as the list gets rather long. At a certain point, it just becomes easy to go back to your tried-and-tested items rather than searching around for something new.

As criticisms go, that’s hardly a terrible one: saying that a game gives you freedom to play it as you want to is probably something more games should aspire to. That The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom gives you all that freedom without ever feeling unfocused or overwhelming is evidence that it lives up to its iconic lineage.

Nintendo provided us with a Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Nintendo Switch code for review purposes.