Best Echoes of Wisdom trick is turning Zelda into a Dungeon Master

We can see the influence of Breath of the Wild And Tears of the Kingdom In Echoes of WisdomNintendo’s latest top-down Zelda game for the Nintendo Switch. But for all the new game’s openness and emphasis on playing the way you want, its most brilliant innovation feels like an inspired redesign of the 2019 game. Link’s Awakening the remake’s clunkiest feature.

Although the recent Link’s Awakening was a (largely) faithful remake of its Game Boy-era predecessor, the Grezzo-produced title changed things up with a playful 3D design, improved controls, and a new dungeon creation mode clearly inspired by Creator of Super Mario. After fighting your way through the game’s traditional dungeons, you can build your own in a spooky little cabin using room tiles inspired by various rooms you’ve previously explored.

There was never much of an element of surprise in these chamber dungeons as you were tasked with choosing what was inside while following a number of rules on how the chamber tiles could be arranged. And while your original dungeons could be used as a reliable way to rack up easy Rupees, the game’s lack of an online component made it impossible to share your creations, which was an important part of Creator of Super MarioThe call.

Also key to Creator of Super MarioThe success of was the simple fact that user-created courses could be many things. amusing to play, and the title as a whole was a very clever exercise in teaching basic video game design. Chamber dungeons were a good idea, but in practice their repetitiveness and lack of flexibility left no room for possibilities. Link’s Awakening It all has a lot of replay value.

While a more refined iteration of Chamber Dungeons could still offer a new gaming experience, the mechanic – much like Link himself – is largely absent as we knew it in Echoes of Wisdomthe first mainline entry in the franchise to make Zelda the playable protagonist. But rather than completely abandon the core concepts that initially made Chamber Dungeons an intriguing proposition, Echoes of Wisdom exploits them from a different and more imaginative angle.

As Echoes of WisdomZelda’s hero and his companion Tri travel around Hyrule equipped with the Tri Rod – a new magical key item that functions much like A link to the pastThe Cane of Somaria. But unlike the Cane, which gave Link the power to create unique square blocks to climb or push on, the Tri Rod gives Zelda the ability to summon multiple copies (called “echoes”) of various objects and monsters that she meets during her adventure. .

Although the game gives you a handful of other useful items, the echoes of the Tri Rod are Zelda’s most powerful weapons to use in combat as she searches for a way to bridge the interdimensional rifts that are popping up all over Hyrule.

Some echoes – like the Boomerang Boarblin and the Bombfish – essentially give you a quick way to whip up the classic. Zelda weapon to which their names refer. But most of them are just glowing replicas of hostile creatures like ReDeads and Darknuts commonly found in Zelda worlds and dungeons.

When Nintendo first revealed Echoes of Wisdomthe echoes — which disappear after taking a certain amount of damage — sounded like a riff on Breath of the Wild And Tears of the KingdomApproaches to providing weapons to players. But in a recent interview on Echoes of Wisdomdevelopment process, director Tomomi Sano and series producer Eiji Aonuma explained that the idea of ​​a Zelda The title built around the concept of copying and pasting objects actually began as part of a game plan focused on Link creating custom dungeons.

While Aonuma was playing an early demo, he began to think that “while it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it, it’s also not so bad to place objects that can be copied and pasted into the game field and create gameplay. where they can be used to fight enemies. And while the team had already been working for about a year to create a “dungeon edition” style game, Anonuma felt that the copy/paste mechanic “had significant potential to be developed into a new way of playing the game.” “. Legend of Zelda games if the gameplay was changed to use “echoes” instead.

Come after Breath of the Wild And Tears of the Kingdom, which some fans have criticized for their relative lack of Zelda dungeons, Echoes of Wisdom in some ways it feels like a homecoming. Individual and themed dungeons filled with small keys and minibosses abound and require you to solve puzzles to discover their hidden secrets. Although Zelda can move objects using binding, she can’t change much about how the new game’s literal dungeons are designed. But the shiny thing built in Echoes of Wisdom This is how he transforms the whole of Hyrule into a new type of dungeon, conceptually, and makes you its fearless master.

When I started playing Echoes of Wisdomthe emphasis on learning echoes from ordinary inanimate objects to help Zelda made the game feel like a standard top-down dungeon crawler that tried to make me think more about how to move vertically in space. Echoes from the table could be used to give the little princess a boost, and piles of restorative beds could be transformed into makeshift stairs. This kind of echoed all gave me different ways to break Zelda out of a prison cell, which felt like a crash course in the game’s stealth missions. But once I discovered the open world and learned my first encounters with monsters, I was surprised to find that I had to familiarize myself with a creature’s behavioral patterns to wield it effectively in combat.

Zelda Dungeons aren’t just elaborate buildings filled with puzzles and locked doors; these are places where monsters live, and the actions of those monsters play an important role in shaping the identity of a dungeon. The same goes for environmental hazards like fire, water, and ice, all of which can help or harm you depending on how you interact with them. Echoes of Wisdom doesn’t let you create your own bespoke dungeons per se, but it does give Zelda plenty of basic elements of a dungeon to play with. And the more you go into the game’s literal dungeons, the more it pushes you to fight by sending monsters into battle – almost as if Zelda herself was thinking like a dungeon designer would.

There’s a narrative poetry in the way that Zelda’s first major outing in her own ongoing legend is one in which her power reshapes the world and uses its rules to her advantage. It’s a setting that presents her as both a princess and a sort of dungeon master – and shows how, 40 years later, Nintendo is still finding fantastic ways to make video games. The Legend of ZeldaOld ideas seem new.