We’ve been waiting decades forZeldato helm her own game. While she has been playable in the likes ofSuper Smash Brosand played a more active role in titles like Ocarina of Time, Spirit Tracks, andTears of the Kingdom, she could never truly be defined as a protagonist. That will soon change.
Echoes of Wisdom will follow Princess Zelda as she is tasked with saving Hyrule from evil as Link is sucked into a strange new dimension known as the Still World. But considering she’s not exactly trained in traditional sword fighting and dungeon crawling, Zelda must use other methods to defeat enemies and solve puzzles. From its very foundation, Echoes of Wisdom is a very different Zelda game in which everything we know has been uprooted.
I played 90 minutes at a recent preview event and my most delightful takeaway was exactly how much freedom Zelda is given to simply screw around. After you gain a few echoes you will no doubt waste countless minutes trying to throw jars on the heads of guards, spawning trampolines to stroke local felines, or testing just how far you can push its systems before they refuse to budge.
One thing I noticed above all though is exactly how strong Zelda is. I refuse to believe this Princess hasn’t done some lifting in her time. Zelda can pick up boulders, rocks, enemies, crates, and the majority of objects you come across like they arenothing.
Obviously, a game like this would be pretty annoying if you were stopped from picking things up at every corner, likely for an arbitrary reason like needing a specific power-up. Nope, she’s able to do both because Nintendo likely realised that it’s easily the most fun that players can have. Who needs a Power Glove?
During the preview event, a journalist friend I was playing alongside constantly nudged me to point out something hilarious he’d done or discovered, while I frequently did the same. There is nothing more funny than watching the ruthlessness in Zelda’s eyes as she spawns a fire-yeeting creature from the ether and then proceeds to throw it into a field of long grass, causing an inferno to envelop the environment and tank the frame rate.
Zelda is framed as a Princess who is suddenly thrust into a position in which she needs to fight back, and how quickly she takes to it is both charming and admirable. Her kingdom is being taken over, but that doesn’t mean she can’t vanquish evil with a smile. Perhaps she will prove that she’s been underestimated all this time too. Zelda is climbing the webs of a spider like a traditional rope that must require some immense upper body strength, not to mention she is picking up boulders and bad guys with the experience of a trained lifter.
When it was announced that the defining power in Echoes of Wisdom was Zelda’s ability to summon living creatures and furniture, I suppose there was a worry that this would become a crutch rather than a constant tool for experimentation. Fortunately, that’s not true at all, and Nintendo is already subverting what we expected from Zelda as a playable character as it turns her into a strong, capable, and no-nonsense heroine who will do anything to save her baby girl.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
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The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom sees you play as the titular princess, searching for Link and saving Hyrule in the process. She uses the Tri Rod to created echoes, duplicates of everything from tables to enemies, to help her on her journey.
