Nintendo and GREZZO's The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is my favorite Zelda game in eighteen years. I don't think that will be true for everyone, especially people who first started the series with BOTW or TOTK, but for people who missed the more linear approach, and for those players who have stuck with the series through decades, Echoes of Wisdom feels like fan service in the best way possible - and it does this without losing the creativity that made these most recent titles so popular.

I'll be honest here, Breath of the Wild nearly clicked with me, but it never really did. Unfortunately, I'm too much of a fan of the bespoke dungeons, multi-tier fetch quests, bustling towns, and item/ability progression offered by previous mainline Legend of Zelda entries for it to ever really stick. Even Tears of the Kingdom, which I loved mechanically and nostalgically, didn't feel like a Zelda game to me. Echoes of Wisdom does.

It almost feels like an experiment, and, knowing what we do about Nintendo as a company, it very well could be. One can almost imagine a one-sentence elevator pitch for Echoes of Wisdom, something akin to "Can the same kind of freedom we gave to players in Tears of the Kingdom work in a traditional Legend of Zelda game?" The answer, thankfully, is absolutely yes.

Where She's Going, She Won't Need Roads

Echoes of Wisdom Lets You Forge Your Own Way Forward

This freedom comes in the form of "echoes," which Zelda creates using a magic wand given to her by Tri - who is, incidentally, my favorite Legend of Zelda companion character now. There are over a hundred echoes Zelda can find, from wooden crates and beds to blocks of water, clouds, and nearly every single enemy in the game, minus the bosses. Some are good for traversal, some are used to solve puzzles, and some are just plain fun.

My top five most used (and thus, most recommended) echoes:

• Trampoline
• Platboom
• Ignizol
• Cloud
• Bombfish

Those more traversal-focused echoes (specifically the trampoline and the Platboom, an enemy in the form of a platform that rises up high and then smashes down) make getting around Echoes of Wisdom's overworld incredibly easy and entertaining. Yes, you could simply follow the road and stay between the trees, but it's much more enjoyable to jump onto the trees themselves. The fact that the map feels so similar to the world map of A Link to the Past probably helps with this - these trees and canyons have been barriers for decades, and now you can just climb right over them.

"Easy and entertaining" is probably the best way to describe Echoes of Wisdom as a whole. It's far from the most difficult Zelda game ever made, and even when the combat is at its hardest there are an abundance of ways to heal yourself in battle. There are food items which can be used to make different types of smoothies at Deku Scrub stands or eaten outright, the classic hearts hidden inside pots and dropped from enemies, and up to four possible bottled fairies.

My favorite way to heal during battle was to pull out my best bed echo and take a quick snooze. Lying in a bed restores hearts over time, but the first refill happens pretty fast, so during a boss fight it's fun to throw out a bed, get some health, hop out again, then repeat the next time you get a chance.

At the beginning, players can do little in the way of damaging enemies besides throwing things at them or using Zelda's Tri-Rod control power to move them over a lethal drop. Despite this, you'll quickly accumulate a wide variety of enemy echoes to use at your own discretion, and certain combinations can absolutely wreck rooms full of enemies with ease. Like Tears of the Kingdom before it, I'm excited to see what kind of combinations the community will come up with once the game is out in the wild.

What Kind Of Zelda Fan Are You?

Echoes of Wisdom Balances BOTW With Twilight Princess

One of the longest-running jokes in gaming revolves around the fact that The Legend of Zelda is a pretty odd title for a series that nearly always focuses on a different protagonist. When playing Echoes of Wisdom, however, it's hard not to feel like this is Zelda's actual legend.

From a story perspective, and without spoiling anything, I have my own theories about where Echoes of Wisdom sits on The Legend of Zelda's timeline that s this game being the real "legend" of Zelda. For someone like me, someone who has been playing this series for over 30 years now, it's lovely.

That's not to say it's a perfect game. The relative ease of combat makes most of the ingredients, smoothies, and power-up accessories (like the hairpins that make hearts drop from enemies more often) relatively unnecessary, and once I got a solid rotation of echoes that meshed with my own playstyle everything else basically got ignored unless it was needed for a specific puzzle or combat encounter.

There are also a noticeable amount of dropped frames when traveling through areas in the overworld, especially in Hyrule Field. As someone who doesn't usually care about such things, even I found it to be a bit too stutter-y at times.

It's Tri's job to help remove the rifts spreading out throughout Hyrule, and players will need to jump into these rifts to enter the "Still World" to assist. Clearing out rifts is reminiscent of Link's excursions in the Twilight Realm in Twilight Princess, with there being a set number of collectibles scattered throughout the area that must be obtained before the rift can be closed. While many of the rifts located in the overworld are optional, even clearing the ones necessary for the main path can become a bit tedious after a while.

Clearing out non-essential rifts in the overworld is often a good way of gaining access to hidden items like chests or Pieces of Heart, so it's definitely worth doing if you are looking to discover as many secrets as possible.

The dungeons in Echoes of Wisdom are fun but never too challenging, and throughout the entire game there was only one instance where I had to think for more than a few minutes about a puzzle. There's nothing on par with some of the hardest Shrine puzzles in BOTW or TOTK, and nothing as obtuse as some of the puzzles in titles like Majora's Mask or Ocarina of Time. Even the more obtuse side quests can be deduced fairly quickly, which is a shame because they are, by and large, fairly enjoyable.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

There's Nothing Wrong With Too Many Options

Like all the best Legend of Zelda games, Echoes of Wisdom is packed with things that aren't actually necessary to beat the game. In addition to the many echoes mentioned above there are also Automatons, robots which can be created by combining multiple types of echoes at a workshop, in case Zelda needs even more assistance during battles. There's a cat suit that lets you talk to cats. You can play the entire game and never realize that there's a farm where you could have gotten a horse if you wanted, but you missed it because you were too busy hopping on trees.

It's especially nice to see both versions of Zora in Echoes of Wisdom. The frilled, monster-like creatures are River Zora, and the sleek, N64-style humanoid fish people are the Sea Zora. Of course, both of them love music.

After a certain point fairly early on, Zelda can also wield a sword (and a few other of Link's iconic weapons) for brief periods of time. The meter drains pretty quickly and, unless you are in the Still World, there are few ways of refilling it consistently.

Because of this, I found myself ignoring the swordfighting form pretty much all the time unless it felt strictly necessary for a boss fight or specific puzzle. I'm sure others will want to use it more often, but I found the gameplay loop of dropping a Darknut in front of me and then using Tri to move it around the room and attack enemies from afar much more satisfying.

Even with this overabundance of options, and even considering the technical limitations and simplicity mentioned above, it's hard not to play Echoes of Wisdom and think, "This is what I've been waiting for."

I'm so glad people loved the freedom and go-anywhere-do-anything approach of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Those are great games, and they are, unequivocally and undeniably, Legend of Zelda games. But, to me, they weren't the "classic Zelda game" I'd been looking forward to. They weren't telling the same story I had gotten so invested in. Echoes of Wisdom is.

If you've been waiting for the series to return to its roots, this isn't quite that. The food system, the map, how side quests are handled, the freedom of traversal, all those things return in one form or another in the same way they have since 2017. But there are dungeons now, real dungeons with real puzzles, and sometimes it's top-down and sometimes the camera switches to a side-on view like Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

In Echoes of Wisdom you can throw out a flying tile echo and ride it like a hoverboard, and you can make cubes of water in thin air and swim over large gaps. There's a "Dream Dojo" where you can undergo combat challenges. Cuccoo wrangling is back! It's fun, it's packed with features you may or may not use, and for both new and longtime fans of the series it's absolutely worth playing - just expect a little bit of a framerate chug when walking in large, bright areas.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom releases on September 26, 2024, for the Nintendo Switch. A digital code was provided to Screen Rant for the purposes of this review.