After a few days of delay spent finishing Unicorn Overlord, I’ve finally started to dig into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. While I’ve been mildly excited about it for a while, I purposefully kept my expectations lowered because there’s been just so much interesting fan art for what a Zelda-As-Protagonist video game might look like that any actual implementation of the concept would probably fall short. It was promising that, rather than go with the stylized but fairly proportional look of the two most recent main-line Legend of Zelda games, Echoes of Wisdom was adopting the more cartoony style that was used for the Link’s Awakening remake. I appreciate a game that isn’t trying to take itself too seriously and Echoes of Wisdom’s fairly simple but still highly detailed art has made for a refreshing look at a brand new game. I half-expected to only ever see that art style in future remakes of games from that era (by which I mean all the LoZ games that originally came out on a GameBoy of some kind), so I’m glad to see that they’re continuing to work with the look that they’ve established for that category of Legend of Zelda game on the Switch. In fact, the only issue I have with the visuals of this game (please keep in mind that I’m still not very far into the game, so there might be something up ahead that changes this opinion of mine) is that the game lags pretty heavily when you’re in “busy” towns with water features. I know that they want to make these games look nice, but they absolutely didn’t need to all-in on the water like they did. I’m not entirely sure that this was a “sacrifice performance on the altar of visual splendor” decision, but it sure is starting to feel like they’re expecting these games to be played on a console that’s more powerful than the seven-year-old Nintendo Switch. I’m not really one to dig too deeply into rumors of the Switch 2 or pass around conspiracy theories about making bad games to keep a franchise fresh in everyone’s mind, but I’m starting to feel like ignoring what seems like a bunch of stuff planned for a more powerful console that just hasn’t materialized would be more foolish than contemplating the idea that some new console has been held back for a couple years now.

Anyway. Echoes of Wisdom. As it turns out, Legend of Zelda games ALWAYS have silent protagonists AND sometimes Link doesn’t talk. In Zelda’s protagonistic debut, she has fallen just as mute as Link often is and while Link is no longer the protagonist, he’s still silent. This time, we learn his words were stolen away by an experience he had getting pulled into the rifts that seem to be an integral part of this version of Hyrule. According to the people of the world, who have been living with these rifts for as long as anyone can remember, kids who get pulled into the rifts come out different and while adults are currently being pulled into these rifts as they start to consume the land of Hyrule, it seems to have historically been a danger to children rather than people of any age. I’m only two Rifts into the game so far, since I’ve been splitting my attention between a lot of different games, so there might be more of an explanation coming my way about why these rifts seem to be targeting children specifically, but I’ve yet to find anything. Hell, the way they talk about it and then drop the topic in favor of returning to the moment makes it feel like I’ve gotten all of the explanation that I’m going to get. Which is weird, you know? Why target only children, especially back when they were more “under control” and not actively consuming Hyrule? That feels incredibly predatory, if I’m being honest. Maybe there’s some child villain behind it all, looking for new friends and only able to make them by dragging people to the shadow realm or whatever it’s being called in this game, but I’m definitely not far enough into the game to know for certain, one way or the other.

The general gameplay of the game feels pretty rewarding. I’ll admit that I’m getting a little overwhelmed by all the stuff you can copy and produce on command, but the actual process of building stairs and ladders and contraptions has actually been a lot of fun. It’s a very fresh way to play a game, to have to stay out of direct combat while summoning the right cloned enemy, enemies, or distraction foods while also finding a balance between getting close so you can target your enemies–so your created monsters focus on the right target–with dodging enemy attacks when the enemies inevitably turn their attention from your summoned ally to you. There’s just so many things you can make! I feel like I’m rapidly running out of the mental processing power required to actually remember everything I can create and I still have two-thirds to three-quarters of the total map to visit. There’s just so many fun little objects! I mean, I’m pretty sure I’ve used each one at least once (though I could have easily missed a couple here or there since sometimes the game just starts throwing them at you when you get into a new area and there’s a ton of ways to solve almost every problem that don’t involve doing what the game intends for you to do), but there’s definitely a bunch of objects that Zelda can make that I just never use. And probably even more that have possible uses that simply haven’t occurred to me yet. I mean, I was in my second battle against a shadow person when I discovered that you can get into the various pots you summon and bop around the map. I don’t know what purpose this serves yet, but I’m looking forward to experimenting with the various types of pots to find out why they bothered to include a feature like that AND why they included such a wide variety of pots. Sure, it’s much, MUCH smaller in scope than Breath of the Wild, but the sense of potential held within this game feels the same to BotW in a way that Tears of the Kingdom could only create when it got incredibly lucky.

I’m excited to go back to Echoes of Wisdom tonight. I don’t know how long it is going to take me to beat it, since I’m unsure of the total size of the game and I’m still super busy with Dragon Age: Inquisition. I kind of wish I could take a week off of Dragon Age to play something more relaxing and fun, but I’ve got just three weeks left (as of this going up) and there’s just so much Dragon Age Inquisition left for me to play… I’m only ten hours into it… Which really isn’t much more time than I’ve put into Echoes of Wisdom, come to think of it. I’ve just enjoyed playing EoW way more than DAI. Which is pretty fair. I’ve mostly just been in the infamous Hinterlands of DA:I so far and that map, plus a few of the other early options, just suck all the joy right out of game since they’re enormous, boring, and lacking any kind of interesting interactions with NPCs….. I don’t know it this says good things about Echoes of Wisdom or bad things about Dragon Age: Inquisition, that I almost feel desperate to stop playing DA:I and play EoW instead. Both, probably. Both can easily be true. Anyway, Echoes of Wisdom is a refreshing entry in the larger LoZ franchise and it has dungeons again for all the people who hated Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom for not having proper dungeons. It has something for everyone except people who had women protagonists. You weirdos are just out of luck, I guess. Good riddance. Zelda finally gets to helm her own franchise for at least one game and I’m all for it.