I had very slight feelings of trepidation when Echoes of Wisdom was initially announced at this year’s big Summer Direct. Zelda games are basically all action-puzzle games, usually a pretty even split, though often they lean more heavy on combat for the moment-to-moment gameplay. There have been past games that leaned more heavily on puzzles like Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks with their insistence on using touchpad for the majority of input, and while those games were good they’re not typically near the top of anybody’s “Best Zelda Game” lists. So yeah, seeing that this would be a Literal Zelda game with minimal direct combat was slightly concerning. But it’s a GREZZO joint, and GREZZO don’t tend to miss.

Echoes of Wisdom is a Zelda game actually starring Zelda for the first time since the CD-I games. The presentation is a direct continuation of GREZZO’s previous outing with the fantastic top-down tilt-shifted toy-like remake of Link’s Awakening (which I loved, it just predates this incarnation of Directional Pad)… but the gameplay is wholly unique to the series.

The game’s core mechanic is (obviously) the titular Echoes. In this incarnation of Hyrule, the world is being consumed by dark rifts, one of which consumes Link in the cold-open of the game. Following this encounter, Zelda meets up with a Tri Spirit charged with fixing these rifts, who gives her a Tri Rod that lets her clone an “echo” of nearly any object or enemy in the game. So instead of fighting, drop a Sea Urchin on a Moblin. Then clone the Moblin. Then command your army of Moblins to do your bidding. Instead of using Link’s typical tools like a feather or a hookshot or a raft or whatever, make a bespoke staircase-bridge out of beds. Cross some lava by spawning a bunch of boulders to use as stepping-stones. But honestly most of the time just use more bed.

This took some getting used to. Not the movement – the movement is spectacular and super intuitive – but the combat can feel clumsy at the start. Some of it is that you have access to very few competent fighter mobs at the start and are limited in how many you can spawn. Like, sometimes keese or zol just want to go do whatever they want to do and that is often not “kill the dude directly in front of you”. It gets a bit easier as you unlock more and better enemy echoes, but also just generally it takes some time to get used to. You do also unlock a “Swordfighter Mode” pretty early on which gives you a time-limited (but upgradable!) ability to play as a pseudo-Link, but until you max it out you won’t be using it often or for lengthy periods of time. Most of the game I used it as an option of last resort, or an option to get in a couple fast easy hits on a boss when they were vulnerable.

The other core mechanic is straight out of TotK, you get the ability to telekinetically link with an object and then drag it around. This has great implications for both combat and puzzle/exploration, instead of having to physically pick something up and lug it around, you can zap it and then lead it where it needs to go, even nudging it up over ledges by jumping or leading it up bed stairways. You can even do this for echoes you’ve spawned, so you can steer your Moblin a bit. Or you can grab an enemy Wolfos or jumpy Lizalfos and hold them directly in front of your Moblin. Or you can grab an enemy and casually drop them off a cliff, or drown them in a cube of water you willed into existence. You also have the ability to “follow” an object you’re linked to, which is used for significantly fewer puzzles, but has some utility for very fast movement.

The world is expansive, far larger than Link’s Awakening, possibly larger than Link to the Past. Continuity-wise, it appears to be all-new, it doesn’t seem directly connected to anything, and has a map roughly analogous to Link to the Past, but with BotW / TotK biome additions of Eldin Mountain, Faron Wetlands, and Mount Lanaryu. And it’s chock full of stuff, there’s multiple towns, a respectable number of Main Dungeons, collectables all over the place, tons of little side-dungeons and little combat encounters and just stuff. The only areas of the map that feel really under-used are the zones directly east and west of the castle, but everything else is so jam-packed with stuff that it’s fine.

There are very few things that disappoint here. The most obvious of which – which thankfully I got over – is that the framerate is abysmal. GREZZO’s Link’s Awakening had a rough base framerate and absolutely chugged in some zone transitions. That’s back, and the erratic framerate is somehow worse in both directions. Sometimes it’ll just chug for no reason, and other times it will randomly give you these bizarre fleeting glimpses into what a reasonable framerate could have been, where it seemingly jumps up to 60, briefly taunting you before settling back down at 30. This will inevitably be fixed by the All New Nintendo Switch (2025), but I rarely re-play games these days, so that’s too late for me.

Couple other miscellaneous minor gripes:

  • Many of the game’s Quests don’t unlock until you’re “done” with a zone, and require you to wander around a town again and find people to talk to, or worse, require you to re-walk the whole zone you just wrapped up to find the trailhead.
  • Some puzzles are super super obtuse. This kind of thing always happens a little bit, but it just feels crappy when so much of the game is incredibly intuitive and then you hit something that’s just a complete blocker. For whatever reason, most of these for me ended up being based around repeatedly forgetting the “follow” ability exists, likely because of how infrequently the game required you to use it.
  • The Echoes menu – which is styled after TotK’s horizontal menus – suffer from a similar problem of getting super unruly as you collect more stuff. It’s serviceable, but it really needed an explicit “favorites” tagging system.

And a couple things where I don’t know if they’re good or bad:

  • There’s a ton of echoes to collect, well over 100, but a lot of them are highly situational, outright pointless, or once you’ve got a direct upgrade there’s no reason to bother with the older ones. But this might actually be fine because the stuff I used might not be what you use. There’s variety. You get to choose your favorite mobs to do your fights, not an “objectively correct mob that stomps on everything”.
  • Similar to the above point, there’s a ton of stuff in this game I basically didn’t interact with and that’s sort of ok because maybe you will? Dampé is back, but now he’s an engineer, and will let you build reasonably strong mechanical versions of echoes, but you have to wind them up first. That’s great, I didn’t use any of them. I unlocked all of them because the brain worms demanded it but I never used them because why would I want “a big moblin but he’s slow to start up” when I could just spawn “a big moblin and he comes out swinging immediately”? There’s also a whole system of Smoothies that let you make customized potions with a system similar to BotW’s cooking with effects and stuff but I found none of the effects incredibly useful. They were good to sell, though!
  • The game is sorta easy? Like, the dungeons are super linear, combat can be pretty breezy, many puzzles can be trivialized once you realize you can make echoes of the Thwomp-like elevator platforms, and most of the collectables are pretty easy to come across. When I hit my usual cleanup-phase right before the very obviously telegraphed point-of-no-return I had 95% of the heart pieces and upgrade materials, more rupees than I could realistically spend on anything, and apparently I came across all but three echoes completely naturally. This feels sorta bad, but actually it might rule? You shouldn’t have to play a Zelda game with a Prima Games Guide or obsessively documented Community Wiki with Interactive Map to experience all of it. You shouldn’t have to scour and interrogate every square inch of the map to find everything. Games respecting your time is good.

If you can look past the abysmal framerate issues, this is an incredibly easy one to Highly Recommend. Would it have been better if Nintendo held this back til after The All New Nintendo Switch (2025)? Ehh, maybe, you can make that decision for yourself. Either enjoy this wonderful little game now, or wait 6 months and possibly enjoy it a tiny bit more.