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~ Estimated Reading Time: 5 min ~

Feels like a mirror world Tears of the Kingdom. Tears allows for such excessive creativity, but often leaves its answer sheets out - placing easy solution items nearby as if they had no confidence in anyone. By giving you an infinite supply of a hundred tools, Echoes doesn't quite point you in any direction to reach the solution you want. It has a hands-on feel to it - often giving you moments to pick your own response every time you just need to surpass even one block. It's just that what comprises those responses is what's now lacking, missing Tears' robust toyish physics engine; the first half of my playthrough was dedicated to making the same steps made out of boxes and beds over and over. If Tears was a game of following lego blueprints, Echoes is a game of making your own designs, but the only blocks you have are the 1x1 pieces. At first, I thought one's preference between the two games was a litmus test about whether you prefer concrete challenges that require concrete answers (no matter how dull), or the toys you play with along the way to the answer. Although the longer I spent with it, Echoes almost feels like an awkward in-between of the former and latter - its squishy dungeons falling over with even the slightest creativity. Its line of satisfaction is born from feeling like you're outsmarting the developers, but it begins to feel more like they're patronizingly letting you skip ahead of them...

The combat is where it's at its thinnest stretched. I was encountering as many neat ways to fight as I was encountering boring ways - it felt so quaint to me when I first pinned an enemy down from both sides, and started raining spikes on them. But equally could I just infinitely spam spikes in front of myself as a perfectly blockade/attack double. And equally equally could I just stand from a distance and shoot infinite bats at them. Some enemies feel designed like neat tools - like the armadillos that bounce around like pool balls - but the ones that feel like automations are handed to you so much more graciously. There are things here that are so much better than any Zelda combat has ever been, and they are weighed as higher risk and slower than options that feel like cumbersome, roundabout ways to reach the same conclusion that mashing the b button to swing a sword once did. For better or worse, this is designed with the same "play the way you find most fun!" mindset of many modern Nintendo games, so I did try my best to push myself into experimenting with all the game's most fun solutions to enemy rooms. But I can only go so far doing the same tricks over and over; having to resort to a "literally turn into Link" button feels boring bandaging over a larger repetition issue. It shows a lack of confidence in both the premise, and its own uniqueness. I feel that people will be disappointed in the initial impression of this being for the girlies this time - when not just its game identity, but Zelda's literal role in the plot amounts to following in the footsteps of our savior hero once again.

And in general, the mechanics don't quite weave together with the cleanliness I expect from a Nintendo affair? Like, why is Breath of the Wild's food crafting here? Niche buffs once valuable for hour-long periods of getting through hot sands and cold mountains now feel as if their practical application is fleeting. It's emblematic of a larger design-hollowness: the staircases of bed, box, and trees I was doing to solve every puzzle never went challenged, new flavour was instead brought by introducing an endless wave of new stuff to mess around with in the second half.
Yet, it's hard for me to write this sorta thing off entirely - I'm more of an artist than a game designer after all. There is a craftsmanship to Nintendo-developed stuff that I often resonate with - both in ways I can articulate, and also in ways I don't even have the experience to put to words yet. It's why I feel like such a cynical jerk criticizing something like this, or Pikmin 4 - no amount of poor directorialship can sour all of the raw creative talent here. The cute little diorama worlds are filled with the tiniest touches to every room that catch my eye, the soundtrack is filled with harmonized violin and flute orchestrations that hold my ears warmly. It's like dollar store Masashi Hamazu! Its polish naturally adds beats accentuating every moment, making the moment to moment feel special. The problem is that it's not special.

Uniqueness is a bit of an unquantifiable, stupid thing to enforce as a standard - and I'm not above enjoying something junk food-y. Maybe the collection of experiences I'm coming off just made me feel as if originality is in over-abundance, making this contrast jarring. But Echoes of Wisdom is like the paragon of spinoff stank - as if everything has to pull from something else, and nothing new will be given the permission to establish. Its main story unceremonious, its side-quests underpaid intern-written. "Zelda isn't beating the Mario allegations" my friend said, watching me play the desert, forest, water, and fire temples - all parading some recurring location name from the past. Zelda's lore tends to peak in personality in its initial dungeon-mastering moments of conception; I don't know if any of the recycled races and locations present here are developed enough to get value from being referenced in the first place. And then you look over to the game this is a sequel to a remake of, and it's like they made being meaningful to lots of people look easy. Not only is "the Zelda game where you play as Zelda" not enough to make this distinct, they could've made the Princess into a character that we retrospectively cared more about when returning to past titles. Maybe it even pisses me off a bit - that these games they're making for girls feel so much less prioritized than their 2023 oeuvres in the same series.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is...I like playing with toys enough to complete this, but I wish it broke out of being another sub-satisfactory product!