@Secret_Tunnel I also just finished that dungeon, though I did it with the intended tool. It was a bit of a letdown though, seemed like they had that idea for the dungeon and couldn't come up with many good utilizations of it, so it just ends up being a really short and simple dungeon in a game where the dungeons are already lighter fare than the typical LOZ.

I've only played, like, three proper dungeons so far, but I like this game a whole lot.

Sure, I would have liked even more involved and demanding dungeons, they could definitely have streamlined the echo selection a bit, and it would have been nice if there had been NPCs or events with as much personality as the new gameplay, but I can't complain a whole lot about it, 'cause I'm just enjoying myself too much. Digging this a whole lot more than Link Between Worlds, for instance.

I was particularly happy to find that when I went to the Eastern Palace, there was an optional mini dungeon there. It's a very minor thing, but it's the kind of thing that goes a long way for me, in Zelda games. Makes exploring even more fun.

I think I'm 100% finished with this one now, with all heart pieces and swordy dealies and non-Amiibo clothing and key items and smoothies and echoes and Dampe gizmos and slumber challenges and et cetera.

Going for 100% is doable without help, but a bit of a slog particularly with the swordy dealies hidden everywhere (so many more than I anticipated). There is an item that helps you find them, though I didn't find that item until I had already scoured the landscape for things without it. If you're going to go for 100%, I'd recommend against blindly looking for stuff and waiting until you get this item, from a sidequest that the Great Fairy eventually makes available. It helped me find the swordy dealies and a few other heart pieces I was missing.

One big takeway for me is that Echoes of Wisdom illustrates how tough it is to make a game that is both satisfyingly open and encourages experimentation throughout. By far my most used echo was one I found within an hour or so of the start, the Gerudo Sanctum's flying tile, which can get you basically anywhere in the game, especially once Tri gets upgraded enough to summon more than one at a time (but even before then, with precise timing). A lot of the game's traversal felt trivial as a result, and the game's challenges are often traversal-based, so I felt like I used the same tool to solve half the game's obstacles.

At the same time, I've been talking with a few friends who felt similarly that some early-obtainable echoes were over-emphasized, but they weren't referring to the one I used and in fact barely used it ever. So it's kind of neat that each player is finding their own "too powerful" echo to use throughout the game.

Similarly, I did some experimentation now and then with echoes used for combat, but once I got Darknut Lv3 (surprisingly early from what I remember) that was all I ever used or needed for 90% of enemies. Which is probably a good thing really, switching your echoes around can get a bit tedious.

It's funny, after 100%ing the game I went back and watched those trailers I skipped, and saw some cool tactics that felt more clever than anything I came up with myself, but I never thought to try them because I never needed to. Makes me wonder if the game would have been better off without some of those more versatile echoes.

All that said, I had a great time with this one (especially early on), and it's definitely a welcome experiment for top-down Zelda. What echoes are you guys using the most?

I'm still early on due to not having much gaming time, but it's been growing on me since my last post. I dunno, something just clicked when I started exploring the (surprisingly large) overworld and stumbling across cool things. Since it's a pseudo-Zelda game, it has the flexibility to break the rules a little so I've enjoyed coming across various novel or surprising things we haven't seen in Link's games.

I do agree with some of the criticisms in this thread though, such as the Echoes themselves having a wide spectrum of useful/lessness, the game being too chatty at points, and my biggest complaint being the Echo selection. But as of right now, only two dungeons in, it's been largely an enjoyable and original experience for the most part.

I finished this tonight! I enjoyed the core mechanic. The menu navigation didn't bother me, I never felt like I was repeatedly using the same few echoes the whole time, and I found improvising with new ones to be really fun. This would be the perfect Zelda game to replay, except...

...for all the bloat! Its interrupting dialogue and fetch quests weren't quite as egregious as some other Zeldas, but I felt that the level design was very uninspired. There were exceptions, like the area r_hjort mentioned (that I didn't even know about until peeking at his spoiler), or the nonlinear forest dungeon that felt like infiltrating an ancient ruin. Overall though, the rifts were a total bore, and when you're not talking to NPCs, that's what you spend most of the game doing.

It's always a shame to see a game get in its own way like this—speed up the cutscenes by 5x, remove the still world, and maybe throw in an extra two dungeons, and this would be peak Zelda! As it stands, it feels like the developers really didn't understand what people loved so much about A Link Between Worlds.