The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is the first game in the long-running Nintendo franchise to properly star the titular character. In this magic-filled romp, you’ll take on the role of Zelda herself, rather than series protagonist Link. And as such, it plays differently too, Zelda able to summon defeated enemies and items to aid her with exploration and combat. If you’re looking to dive in and see what this fresh take on an established line of games looks like, here are all the details on The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, like most games in the series, determines your time spent in the game based on how fast you are at solving puzzles—and how much side-content you want to finish, of course. However, a playthrough of just the main story, with minimal optional detours, should take on average around 15 hours.
Zelda’s ability to summon the echoes of enemies and items to help with fights and solve puzzles is a lot of fun, but not all of them are required to beat the main story—meaning there’s a lot of extra stuff to find and do. If discovering everything is your goal, this will require diving into optional dungeons scattered throughout the map, defeating bosses you might’ve otherwise never faced, and completing a wide variety of side-quests.
Many of the echoes (summons) earned in these optional locations can massively improve your ability to move around the map, or more easily complete puzzles. As such, you can (and should) go out of your way to collect all the possible combinations if you want to get the most out of the game. Aiming to collect all of the echoes and complete all of the side-quests in the game can take up to 25 to 30 hours.
While Zelda’s primary method of combat includes summoning enemies to fight on her behalf, you might be surprised to hear that you can actually summon a sword, too! Doing so grants you the swordfighting form, letting you function similarly to Link in combat as you slice and dice through your foes. However, this form uses energy that can run out fairly quickly, and will require you to collect orbs to replenish it, so you’ll want to save its use for scenarios where it really matters.
All of the cool echoes you find exploring can make for faster and easier movement around the map, but even so, long-distance journeys can take a while. There’s some good news: the game offers fast travel. You can use waypoints across the map to quickly move to previously-visited locations, cutting your travel time by a significant amount.
Yes! The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom features two difficulty modes: Normal and Hero. The former provides the standard experience that most players are likely to want to play. However, the latter features multiple changes that make things more challenging, such as Zelda taking increased damage from enemies, and no hearts being dropped in the overworld for quick health regeneration.
It’s important to note that you can change the difficulty in the menu at any time, so if you start on Hero Mode and find it too challenging, you can always bump things down a notch to make it a bit easier on yourself.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a single-player game, so it does not offer any type of couch or online cooperative play. Players assume the role of Zelda exclusively throughout the game, and thank goodness Tingle doesn’t seem to be around. However, due to having the ability to summon foes to aid you in battle, it can sometimes feel like you’ve got friends helping out—because you kind of do! Just, not human friends.
Thank goodness, the answer is yes! While reviews are more critical than Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom’s unadulterated adulation, at the time of writing its Metascore is a very healthy 86, and Kotaku’s own review has many great things to say about a lovely game.
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