For years I’ve been wonderingwhen Nintendo would finally launch a new 2D Zelda. BothBreath of the WildandTears of the Kingdomhave launched in the time since the last new top-down entry in the series, 2013’s A Link Between Worlds. Since then, Nintendo released the multiplayer game Tri Force Heroes on 3DS and the Switch remake of Link’s Awakening. Neither of those games were what I really want: an original single-player game.
The Long-Awaited Return of 2D Zelda With Echoes Of Wisdom
At this week’sNintendo Direct, the Big N finally unveiled an all-new Zelda game. And when I say an all-newZeldagame, I mean it:The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdomis the first mainline game in the series to star Zelda instead of Link.
Of course, people unfamiliar with TLOZ have assumed that Zelda is the main character for decades.
That new playable character brings new abilities as Zelda doesn’t carry Link’s sword. Instead, she wields a staff, called the Tri Rod, which opens the possibility for entirely new interactions with the world. The result is that, while fans may have just wanted a return of classic 2D Zelda, they got a lot more than they bargained for. 2D Zelda, yes; classic, not quite.
In fact, from the trailer shown in the Nintendo Direct, Echoes of Wisdom looks more like a top-down Tears of the Kingdom than traditional Zelda. That wand Zelda carries allows her to make a copy of an object in the world, and then store its “echo” for future use. The trailer shows her climbing a seemingly insurmountable wall by stacking multiple copies of a table on top of one another.
Playing Your Way Defines Tears Of The Kingdom, And Now Echoes Of Wisdom
During the Direct, the narrator said that “how you use [echoes] separately or together is entirely up to you,” and Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma explained the gameplay in a similar way: “How you solve puzzles and battle enemies will change depending on the echoes used. In short, we’ve created a game where each player’s experience will be different.”
That sounds an awful lot like the design philosophy Aonuma previously laid out for the recent Switch Zeldas. Instead of asking players to find one prescribed solution, the game offers a bunch of versatile tools and lets you pick and choose how to use them. In the trailer, Zelda crosses a gap to reach a city wall by placing an old bed down as a bridge, then reaches the top of the wall by summoning an echo of a trampoline. There’s another bit where Zelda drops a hunk of meat on the ground, attracting enemy birds, then summons a piranha plant which attacks them once they draw near. This is not “find the key” Zelda, like A Link to the Past. It’s “make the key” Zelda like Tears of the Kingdom.
In one key moment, the demo-er scrolls through a series of nine items in an inventory bar that looks strikingly similar to the one used to select fusible items in Tears of the Kingdom. There are plenty of other echoes used in the presentation, for everything from traversal to puzzle-solving to combat, and Aonuma confessed to not knowing how many echoes there would be in the finished game.
As a fan of BOTW and TOTK, Echoes of Wisdom looks like a rollicking good time. I can’t wait to see what bizarre item combinations I can cook up to make Rube Goldberg machines for killing Moblins in needlessly complicated ways. When the last 2D Zelda came out, this is not what I expected the series I loved to become, but I’m so glad to witness its transformation.
