The biggest shock on Tuesday The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom the reveal was, of course, that Princess Zelda would be the playable character. The second biggest shock was that the game even existed and that it was coming out after three months.
The third biggest shock took a little longer to register for me, but is probably an even bigger deal: An echo of wisdom is a clear indication that Nintendo has turned its back on what you might call traditional Zelda game design forever.
Tradition is very important to the Legend of Zelda series. This series of games, spanning 38 Earth years (and Hyrule’s millennia), essentially tells and retells the same story over and over again. Likewise, its game design has changed and shifted within strict boundaries, adhering to the timeworn rituals of Zelda.
For decades, each game opened up in a gradual, non-linear but carefully prescribed manner as the player unlocked new tools that fit like keys in the map’s many locks and used them to find solutions to complex puzzles. In the first Zelda game review I wrote — I think it was for Minish Cap, in 2004 — I described the games as “clockwork fairy tales,” meaning that they operate as beautiful, precise machines into which the player can place themselves. And they remained so – until 2017.
Image: Nintendo
Breath of the wild tore up the Zelda rulebook. It gave players all the most important tools at the beginning of the game and allowed them to explore the map in any direction, tackling its challenges in random order. Through systems like weapon durability, weather, stamina, and cooking, it also added a lot of variables to keep players on their toes and encourage improvisation.
Then 2023 The tears of the kingdom turbocharged that approach with a handful of abilities that seemed designed less to disrupt the game’s design than to break it entirely. Ultrahand allows players to build their own furniture, buildings, vehicles, and powered gear. Fuse connects almost every object in the game to the weapon system. Back allows players to send individual objects back in time. And Ascend—which began life as a debugging tool for developers—is an almost literal cheat, a get-out-of-jail-free card.
With these two open world games, The tears of the kingdom especially series producer Eiji Aonuma and his team shifted the Zelda design paradigm towards openness and player creativity (up to a point). Those games were hugely popular, but – perhaps due to the accumulated cultural weight of the first three decades of Zelda games – I assumed that traditional Zelda would live on alongside this new strain, possibly in smaller titles, returning to the 2D roots of the series.
It seems not. We introduce you An echo of wisdom in a video, Aonuma laid it out on the line: “Here we wanted to create a new style of play that breaks the conventions seen in past top-down Legend of Zelda games,” he said. Nintendo isn’t done messing with its beloved franchise — or rather, letting players mess with it and challenging its designers to keep up.
In the game, Princess Zelda can use a magical staff called the Tri Rod to create copies of objects and even monsters called Echoes. She can build stairs out of bed frames, summon moblins to fight for her, or create free-standing columns of water. In the video, Aonuma pointed out that the way battles or puzzle solutions go will vary greatly from player to player depending on the echo they use. The Echo ability is Princess Zelda’s Ultrahand; just as in The tears of the kingdomthe ability to brute force the game’s challenges, or go outside the usual Zelda rule set to work around them, is built into the game’s design and part of the fun.
An echo of wisdom will be the first brand new Zelda game to come out since Link’s open world adventures rocked the series. Visually, it looks exactly like the 2019 remake of the 1993 classic The awakening of connection, but design-wise it feels like it belongs in that different, newer breed of Zelda games. Embracing player creativity and freedom now seems to be a core tenet of the series. Aonuma’s Quiet Revolution Continues; Zelda will never be the same again.
