Be Patient with Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’s Most Annoying Feature: Its Combat

By Garrett Martin | October 4, 2024 | 12:17pm

Video Games Features The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Be Patient with Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’s Most Annoying Feature: Its Combat

I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom doesn’t make the best first impression. That has nothing to do with playing as Zelda instead of Link, or returning to a classic but distant overhead perspective instead of the more immediate worlds of the groundbreaking Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. It comes down to one thing, really—but one thing that’s been central to these games since the very first one back in 1986: the combat. It kinda stinks at first.

There have been different wrinkles and variations over the decades, and the perpetual outlier that is Zelda II, but fighting in Zelda games has generally been fairly consistent. You’ve got a sword for the heavy lifting, a shield for blocking, a bow for attacking from a distance, and bombs to make just a big ol’ mess of everything. You’re usually limited with the arrows and bombs in some way, but the sword’s there for the swinging. Hit a button and watch it fly. It’s simple, direct, satisfying, and the foundation of basically the whole damn series.

Except for Echoes of Wisdom. Remember, you’re playing as Zelda, not Link. He’s the legendary swordsman of the sacred prophecy, and so on. Zelda’s in that legend, too, but there’s no mention of a sword with her. No, she’s a priestess, and the videogames in which clergy get to carry swords instead of maces, prayers or spells are rare indeed.

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So Zelda’s capable, but no sword master. She gets by with magic, summoning “echoes”—copies of monsters she’s beaten in the past—who will attack enemies on sight. This is a cool mechanic when it’s used to solve puzzles; your temporary minions can run interference with any critters trying to whack you while you light braziers or move rocks around or whatever you have to do to open a door. At the beginning, though, it doesn’t work that well when you have to mount a front-on attack; you never control your summoned monsters directly, and they can be a bit slow on the draw, so you’ll often find yourself standing around, waiting for your echo to do its one job.

The game’s solution to this problem comes along early on. In time it lets Zelda wield a sword like Link would—but with a catch. She can only use that sword for a short period of time before its meter runs dry. It doesn’t refill on its own, but only through using potions or by collecting drops sometimes left by defeated enemies. It’s not uncommon to find yourself with no sword juice for the bulk of a dungeon, forcing you to rely on those phantoms you conjure out of thin air to fight your battles for you.

Initially this is pretty damn annoying. After almost 40 years of Zelda games letting you use a sword indiscriminately, a limitation like this feels not just punitive but arbitrary—similar to how Metroid: Other M, the worst of that series, depowers Samus for flimsy, nonsensical reasons.

Over time, though, you’ll power up your sword, boosting its damage and (crucially) increasing the energy meter so that it lasts longer. Those limitations gradually start to interplay with the echo system, revealing a clever and somewhat complex combat system that’s often integrated tightly with the game’s puzzles. This is especially true with boss battles, where you’re not just dodging or blocking until you can get a few strikes in, but playing a game of spinning plates between the short-lived echoes and limited sword energy—all while also staying mindful of defense.

The echoes system also opens up some weird, unexpected ways to kill the bad guys. You don’t just use it to summon monsters, but certain objects as well—tables, rocks, beds (incredibly useful for crossing chasms, and also for refilling your health basically whenever you need to), and, crucially, blocks of free-standing water that might be the most useful thing in the whole game. Even if you’re on dry land—even if you’re in the middle of the desert—you can stack four those water blocks on top of each other and use them to float up to things Zelda couldn’t otherwise reach. You can use them to build water tunnels to swim through over open pits. They’re also useful in combat, which is why I’m bringing them up in the first place; if a surface-dwelling monster scurries into one of these portable bodies of water—or if, say, a clever priestess trying to stay alive in the dangerous world of Hyrule can move a monster into one of them—they’ll instantly die. It’s just a taste of how Echoes of Wisdom‘s different systems can bounce off of each other to unpredictable ends—like a smaller, streamlined version of the open-ended play found in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, custom-fitted for a more traditional Zelda.

Again, though: you’ve got to be patient. The first couple of hours of Echoes of Wisdom were a drag for me. When you’ve got a half-dozen new and upcoming games to work through, and multiple sections to edit and write for, you can’t always stick with something that actively pushes you away. I was ready to dismiss Echoes of Wisdom as a failed experiment and refocus my limited game time on something more timely, but right as I was about to do that the combat started to click. It might still be a little more methodical than past Zelda games, but it stops being tedious once it ties the sword and the echoes into a unified system.

There are a couple dozen Zeldas already out there in the world. A new one shouldn’t be celebrated just because it’s a new Zelda—or just because it’s a Zelda game that does something new. Echoes of Wisdom gets to a point where its main mechanics make sense and snap in place together, but until then it can be an off-putting bore. That’s a risk Nintendo took, and could be a barrier for entry for those who don’t have the time or patience to stick with the game. If you do, though, you’ll find a satisfying depth to this combat system, which is more complex and rewarding than it first seems.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, music, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.