@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.

Ok I just finished the fourth dungeon, I must be loosely halfway through, time to chime in.

I don't get the negativity! Ok, I'm not going to be an IGN weirdo and act like an 8/10 (basically a 7.9/10) is THE WORST POSSIBLE SCORE EVAR but I kind of don't get why this game isn't getting a better reception here!

I love it! It's probably my favorite "2D" Zelda since the GOAT Link to the Past. It really feels like they found a way to combine the classic 2D feel with stuff from the BOTW/TOTK era (unique ways to move / fight, caves everywhere, field "boss" fights, etc.) It's not perfect but it feels great to me.

I LOVE the echo ability so much. Yes, I agree that parts of it could have been implemented better. Having a LONGGGGGGG (and continually growing) line of things to pick from is not ideal, and even being able to sort it in various ways feels limited. One thing I keep wishing they added would be something like TOTK's blueprints system, so I could copy something (say 4 beds stacked in a row, or a combination of enemies that I like to battle with) and then instantly use it later. Missed opportunity there.

But I get excited about every new echo. And I try them all out! And yeah, many of them I try once and then never use again. But I do find a lot of uses for a wider variety of things and creatures than it seems some people have. Even if I have my go tos. Also, I think they handled the turning into Link thing well, you can do it enough so that it helps a lot but generally can't totally replace fighting with your echoes either. Mixing between the two is interesting.

The dungeons themselves well, I've enjoyed them. They're probably not the best Zelda dungeons ever, but I've done enough unique / new stuff in them to be satisfied. Boss fights have been solid. It's fun fighting with echoes. Feels a bit like Pikmin at times.

The overworld has just been a joy to explore. Like I said, caves everywhere!

I still have a ways to go so I'll have more to say later but... it's good!

I'm so happy I'm not the only one loving this game! It's not up there with A Link to the Past or Link's Awakening for me, but I think it's pretty bloody fantastic all the same. Hadn't played it properly for a few days, but when I started it up today I just started drifting around Hyrule, checking out stuff that I happened to come across, and it was great. Didn't really accomplish anything in terms of the main quest, but exploring caves and mini dungeons and just playing around with the echoes felt good enough.

nate38 said:

What echoes are you guys using the most?

My go-to combat echo is the Sword Moblin Lv. 3. Found that one particularly early, so as soon as I could use it, I started and never went back. Though now that I have Darknut Lv. 3, I'm very tempted to try that one out.

For traversal I'm not going too fancy. I'll use the Old Bed for small gaps or the Water Block for ascension, but I've been using and experimenting with the Cloud a lot more lately.

But overall I've really been enjoying the game. I am a lore guy though, so at a little over 6 dungeons in, I'm hoping they land the plane on the story. The back story that was provided was very interesting but it kind of seemed to contradict something from another game in the series. (I think I can head-canon a way to make it work though.) So I'm curious to see where it goes from here.

Lol, I just skipped the path to Hebra mountain. And then I went back and did it anyway. But it's fun seeing what you can break in this game.

Beat this last night. It's good, but I liked ALBW better. This game felt too linear, but was still refreshing and fun after the epics of TOK and BOTW. There's some good ideas here that could be streamlined. Menuing the echoes was, uh, suboptimal. Many were useless. Final boss was more of a chore than challenge. Fun story and world at least.

I'm waist-deep in this game now, portioning out my overworld and dungeon exploration in the same manner that I usually do when playing Zelda games. And it's at the point where I can pretty comfortably place it somewhere in the Zelda hierarchy.

I quite like this game's overworld. It's not as dense as something like Link's Awakening or ALBW, and it'd be nice to see a few more secrets, but it's still rather sprawling and feels appropriately large. The enemy variety is excellent, which means the Echo variety is too. I'm playing on Hard (with a self-imposed "no resting in beds" rule), so smoothies are required and ingredients feel like a worthy reward, but I dunno if I'd want them on Normal.

As someone who felt that ALBW's biggest issue was reusing the map, I don't mind it at all here. The ALttP overworld makes up only about half of this game's map (if that) and it's really cool seeing how it extends past all the borders of that game. Plus a lot of the familiar areas are shaken up anyway, so it's really more like it just reuses the skeleton of that map. Reminds me of games like Super Metroid, Dragon Quest III, and StarTropics 2 in terms of bringing back and repurposing classic areas.

I find the story elements and scenarios to be uneven. I liked the Zora sequence and the opening was very cool, but a lot of this is just going through the motions for me. It feels like the series is in a rut when various races are struggling with the same ol' problems. Oh, the Gerudo are dealing with monsters in the desert again, the Gorons have a food problem AGAIN, etc. For a game that delights in breaking tradition they should've been a lot more creative with the story elements.

...At least they could've trimmed down the dialogue! Shoot, I'm not sure when the Treehouse's writing changed but it sure has been blah lately. Hardly any character has their own voice anymore, and everyone talks too much. And control is wrested from you way too often. And Tri is boring, man oh man. They should've just had Zelda have lines, or just forewent the "buddy that explains everything" thing since they were phasing that out with BotW/TotK.

The dungeons are pretty simple for the most part. Often too simple, to be honest. The volcano one in particular was a real let-down for me, as it felt like a slightly longer cave. Very linear, not too interesting. That said, I loved the jungle/ruins dungeon! Super fun, tricky without being tedious, and it brought back two classic bosses: Gohma and the rarely-seen Manhandla!

I'm not done yet but I feel like this'll end up at, like, a high 8 or something? Not amazing for Zelda, but still probably my favorite game of the year so far. It'd be above the DS games, multiplayer games and maybe Zelda 2 but probably below the traditional Link adventures.

TriforceBun said:

...At least they could've trimmed down the dialogue! Shoot, I'm not sure when the Treehouse's writing changed but it sure has been blah lately. Hardly any character has their own voice anymore, and everyone talks too much.

I really don't want to be that guy, but Nintendo's recent trend of referring to genderless monsters as "they" instead of "it" has felt very jarring to me.

Nintendo's whole brand during the Switch era, as a reaction to their Wii U style, has been to remain as neutral and inoffensive as possible. No games where you help a dog with his failing marriage to save real-world money, no experimental social networks, no Mega64-directed E3 announcements. Treehouse's writing has reflected this, trading their early 2010s self-aware meme humor for a clean Corporate Memphis word slurry—not realizing that the presence of any text at all in games is abhorrent in itself.

Bowser's Fury was Nintendo's first demonstration since the 80s that they understand this, and I've got my fingers crossed that the 3D Mario team decides to stick with their no-dialogue style and ends up influencing the rest of the company.

Secret_Tunnel said:

I really don't want to be that guy, but Nintendo's recent trend of referring to genderless monsters as "they" instead of "it" has felt very jarring to me.

Haha geez, this is a whole can of worms. But now that it's open, I'll go ahead and agree with you. It throws me off by adding another layer of nebulousness to some of the lines. Like when you highlight Tri's Power on the map screen, the descriptor text says "Power Tri has received from their friends." My brain goes, "Wait, from whose friends? Did I miss something?" *rereads text* "Oh, Tri's friends." This happened a number of times in the Deku area as well. Apparently Tri refers to him/it/themself? using male terms in Japan so I'm not sure why they didn't just go that route (To nitpick further, it also reads weird, as "Power Tri has received from their friends." is not a sentence and makes me think that "Power Tri" is like some form of Tri or something at first glance).

It's especially weird with the Dekus. Sure, plants themselves don't really have a sex but 1) Majora's Mask already established Deku Princesses and Kings and butlers and butlers' sons, etc and 2) the characters are clearly designed to look male or female based on cute foliage mustaches and floral hairdos and junk.

The larger thing is just what you'd said though, that NOA's writing has been a corporate word slurry lately. You see it in Mario Wonder's completely superfluous floral kingdom bits, in Animal Crossing's milquetoast villagers, here in Echoes of Wisdom. I found myself longing for the concise, off-the-wall writing of Link's Awakening again (which thankfully remained almost entirely intact in the remake).

Echoes is a good game though, still.

Secret_Tunnel said:

Bowser's Fury was Nintendo's first demonstration since the 80s that they understand this, and I've got my fingers crossed that the 3D Mario team decides to stick with their no-dialogue style and ends up influencing the rest of the company.

I'm curious what you're referring to here though. The relative lack of dialogue in Bowser's Fury?

@TriforceBun

The use of "they" is particularly strange to me when referring to enemies that are characterized by their lack of humanity. An eldritch force that wants to destroy all life is an "it"! I vaguely remember Pikmin 4 and maybe one of the recent Pokemon games being weird about this.

As far as Bowser's Fury goes, yeah, I'm just harping on my usual disdain for dialogue in games. Best-case scenario it's milquetoast and wastes your time, but I think it often becomes a design crutch that changes the way the game plays too. Compare the ring-diving minigame in Tears of the Kingdom that you have to talk to an NPC to activate to the swimming-through-rings minigame in Bowser's Fury that triggers immediately when you touch the first one. Nintendo seems to think that having NPCs explain stuff to you makes their games more accessible, when in reality, no one wants to read all that! Especially not little kids.

Nintendo isn't nearly as bad about this as any other developer, but the huge amount of text is still weirdly hostile to players for the sake of authorship in a way that Nintendo claims to pride itself on not indulging in. "Miyamoto doesn't allow story in games!" then why don't the games ever shut up? It's the worst of both worlds: neurotic product manager-imposed explanations that are too afraid to do anything interesting with characterization or lore lest they have an unpredictable impact on the brand.

@Secret_Tunnel

It's really part of a much larger topic. The funny thing is that I love visual novels and RPGs like Dragon Quest which require talking to a priest every time you want to save. So to me it's not necessarily about the amount of dialogue or even required dialogue for menial, common tasks. I don't even know if I can articulate it correctly but it's on a case-by-case basis. For EOW, I feel like I lose control of my character too often for the kind of game it is.

Is it an unfair expectation that 2D Zelda has fewer dialogue sections than 3D Zelda (or RPGs, or VNs, etc)? I dunno. There's something about the snappy immediacy of these top-down games that makes me just want to get exploring. But I also think I'd be less annoyed by it if the writing was stronger on a macro level. I did enjoy the Zora section, for instance, and found the instrument-based Sea/River Zora feud to be pretty whimsical and it leaned into the series' lore as a bonus. But man, seeing those Gerudo and Gorons again with their same stupid problems and goin' into the same rifts with the little spinny animations every time...it sounds nitpicky but it adds up and I think it'll make the game less replayable in the long run because of it.

I guess part of it is just the predictability of it all. After the first couple scenarios, the game's episodes fall into a formula and there's only so many times you can hear a variant on a character saying "fix the rift" at you.

But yeah, in a broader sense I agree that Nintendo leans too heavily into "over-explaining" territory. A billion and one essays/videos have been made about Super Mario Bros' invisible tutorial-izing in 1-1 but that type of design really works. And in a sense, they still have solid level design and know how to craft areas around abilities. They just add all this extra fluff on top of it that's unnecessary, and I was hoping the low-dialogue, snappier approaches to Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey were them essentially course-correcting.

@TriforceBun

There's some writing in games I like. Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask. Kyle Gabler's and Jonathan Blow's games. Spelunky. A little bit of dialogue adds flavorful context to the world, makes what you're doing feel more impactful and relevant.

There are also visual novels I've liked! The Zero Escape series in particular. But I basically consider that to be a different medium more akin to traditional novels than arcade games. I think certain games like the Metal Gear Solid series or some old-school Final Fantasies can pull off the hybrid media approach, but I wish it wasn't the default. If gamedevs feel the need to justify their mechanics with a premise, "crocodiles stole my bananas" is as complex as you need to get.

Oh, I finished this game. Almost 100% but i missed a few things somewhere in there.

I loved it! It's hard to explain because I know everyone feels differently, but this was the first game that really made me feel like they took the Link to the Past style Zelda and made it bigger and better. Yeah I know, that's Link's Awakening or Link Between Worlds for some people, but for whatever reason both of those games, while being great, never quite hit me like Echoes of Wisdom did. I think it just hit the right spot for me, a sort of hybrid between Link to the Past and Tears of the Kingdom in some ways.

I played on Hero mode, which was the right way to play. Probably way too easy on normal mode.

I loved the Echo system a ton. It's like a mini Pikmin game. But with way more variety in helpers. (And way less that you can use at the same time.) Letting you also turn into Link for a bit was a good choice as well to bring the whole system together. I do think it can definitely be improved though, especially how you select echoes. I'd love to see a sequel.

It also seemed to reward exploration a lot. Caves everywhere, and a few extra mini-dungeons and boss fights and such. Sure they could work to make the rewards better but I didn't mind it, the gameplay itself was compelling and sometimes you get some neat stuff.

Also, I think it was just the right length, and it made me even more sure that I want a smaller / more focused BOTW / TOTK style Zelda. Don't get me wrong, I like those games being bigger than old school Zelda, but they're kind of too big? Especially with Tears of the Kingdom after awhile I started to cringe a bit whenever I saw yet another korok who needed to get to his friend or a guy who needed help with his sign and so on. The only thing that compares to that in Echoes is maybe the acorn guy, but I think he shows up what like 8-10 times?

With that said it wasn't a perfect game. Some of the dungeons felt too straightforward, not enough cool gimmicks. Sorting the echoes is a hassle when you get a lot. Nintendo (or Grezzo, or whoever made this decision) STILL sucks at letting you get back to the action when you fail at something. When you fail at a mini-game it often boots you out and then you need to go through a ton of dialog to try again. Why is there no immediate TRY AGAIN option? (Reminds me of when I compared the BIT.TRIP Runner fail -> get back in the game wait time to that of one of the New Super Mario games and it was something like 2 seconds for BIT.TRIP and 20 seconds for Mario. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THIS.)

Also, this is more a criticism of Zelda as a whole but like... remaking the same Hyrule map over and over and over is getting a bit old. Give us more Zelda games that take place in a completely different world! With new environments and new types of species to encounter! Echoes 2 Majora's Mask style would be a dream! I also miss the bigger "world changing" stuff like going between two worlds in Link to the Past, time stuff in Ocarina of Time / Majora's Mask, etc. For awhile it seemed like Nintendo was going to run with that kind of thing but it feels like they backed off on it in recent games.

But still, these are minor criticisms. I love Echoes!

Random side note: There don't seem to be any like likes in this game? That surprised me, it's a Zelda staple! And especially when that one guy says he wants something that swallows stuff whole I expected to run into them, but it turned out to be something else entirely.

@Zero

I like your Pikmin comparison, I felt the same way about it!

@Zero

Good writeup! I agree with much of it although I'm not quite done.

Interestingly, while I didn't enjoy it quite as much as you, I actually don't have a problem with one of your issues. Because the map is expanded so much from ALttP, I didn't mind the reuse at all for reasons I mentioned earlier. And I DID mind it in ALBW (which is still one of my favorite 2D Zeldas regardless).

Totally agree about the downtime though. I was getting pretty grumpy doing the otherwise fun Sleep Dojo mini game last night because of the good 20 seconds or so of mashing A between each attempt. Nintendo and/or Grezzo really needs to check out Masahiro Sakurai's excellent YouTube series to avoid amateurish downtime mistakes like this. EoW has this problem in several different places, really, from things like mini-cutscenes/animations each time you enter voids, to the head-scratching decision of putting the default on "No" when you're starting up your file (I know it's super minor but WHY)!



Nintendo! Every developer! Watch this!

I actually didn't even notice right away that it was the LTTP map, and I think it is different / expanded enough that it doesn't really feel like a direct rehash. I'm more just kind of getting sick of how predictable some stuff is. There will be the goron fire mountain, the zora water, the gerudo desert. A mystical forest. Castle in the middle of everything. And so on.

I want to be dropped in a Zelda map and have no idea what to expect!