The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdomis launching in a week, and I am beyond ready to get my hands on the first all-new single-playerZeldagame in 11 years. As a fan of the series, I’ve really felt that decade-plus absence, and I’m especially excited that it’s launching on September 26, because that’s the Thursday before a weekend when I have no concrete plans.
More important than it launching right before a weekend — most big games do — is the fact that it’s launching right before afall weekend. 2D Zeldas are the perfect games to play during this time of year, and I’m tired of pretending that they’re not.
Autumn Is For Lazy Zelda Weekends
When I think of a perfect fall weekend, it’s a knife’s edge balance between activity and relaxation. You want to go out and pick apples or take a hayride or do a corn maze or just eat some donuts at a place where you can do all three of those things.
But you also want to spend time on the couch watching autumnal standards likeGilmore Girlsand Double, Double Toil and Trouble (yes, the Mary-Kate and Ashley Halloween movie is a certified fall classic). You want to make a fragrant soup and some buckeyes for dessert, but you also want to drink hot toddies on the couch. You want to carve pumpkins, but you also want to eat pumpkin pie. Activity and inactivity, together in harmony.
A 2D Zelda fits perfectly in this picture. There is nothing better on a fall weekend than getting cozy on the couch, wrapping up in quilts, and playing hours and hours of Zelda. What is it about Zelda’s gameplay that makes this the ideal pairing? I’ve been attempting to root out the reason my mind gravitates to Zelda in the colder months, and I’ve come to a few conclusions.
The easy answer is nostalgia. I’ve often gotten Zelda games as Christmas presents, and I associate playing them with the colder months, when the house is lit with candles and warm colors, and a soup is simmering on the stove. Then again, I think that rationale could apply to any game I’ve played at the end of the year. I gotSonic Adventure 2for Christmas, too, but it isn’t intrinsically tied up with the season for me.
Sonic Adventure 2 is actually, bizarrely, tied up withThe Matrix, because I remember being banished to my room while the grown-ups watched the Wachowskis' sci-fi masterpiece downstairs, and sneaking peeks between Sonic levels.
2D Zelda Games Are Best In Long Sessions
No, it isn’t just nostalgia. 2D Zelda’s gameplay inherently lends itself well to the colder months. These are months when it’s okay to want to stay inside, when most people can agree that camping out on the couch is a wise move. Not everyone plays video games, but this is the season for movie marathons, for TV series binges, for endless rounds ofCatanor cards. It’s the socially acceptable season for being sedentary.
And 2D Zelda games reward long, focused hours. Unlike the recent 3D Zelda games, which have had shorter dungeons, the 2D games offer longer dungeons that are often structured as one big puzzle. This design rewards the longer attention spans required to figure out how a space fits together. If you can play through a dungeon in one sitting, that’s good, but it can be hard to dedicate the hours it takes to solve. The autumn makes that easier. There are fewer expectations of movement, so you’re free to just sit there, noodling away at the task at hand.
Echoes of Wisdom is arriving at the perfect time, at the beginning of 2024’s autumn, and also in the autumn of the console it’s releasing on. By next autumn, the Switch will probably be old news, replaced by a successor that can do everything the handheld console can do, but better. I’m ready for that. But I’m also ready to celebrate an all-time favorite console with one last hayride through Hyrule.
