Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are both excellent games. The seven-year gap between them was absolutely worth the wait. But a part of me yearned for a return to a Zelda experience more reminiscent of older adventures. 

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom innovates on the Zelda formula in both new and familiar ways. It delivers a welcome return to form while carving its own identity. 

While Link is normally the player character in the series, Echoes of Wisdom sees Princess Zelda taking up the reins of the protagonist. Zelda is by no means a damsel in distress in most games, but it is nice to see her get attention. 

Zelda explores the Kingdom of Hyrule with Tri, a little star-like creature. Together, they seek to eradicate mysterious dark rifts. 

But if we’re not playing as Link, that means we don’t have his trusty weapons. How does Zelda defend herself? With the Echoes from her Tri Rod, of course.

With the Tri Rod, Zelda can save a plethora of objects and monsters to memory, permanently gaining the ability to summon a copy of them. However, these Echoes are of limited use, so the player can’t simply overwhelm their target. 

Beyond the gimmick of Echoes, this game follows a fairly standard formula for a Legend of Zelda game. You are given multiple choices to follow the main story and side quests litter the land. 

However, instead of using traditional items from the series’ history, the player is often forced to use their echoes creatively to solve puzzles.

For example, if you need to cross a pit, you can stack beds across it to act as a bridge. If you keep losing a race, you can summon a tornado to destroy the obstacles in your way. 

The music is also excellent. The soundtrack consists of a combination of new tracks and remixes of tracks from elsewhere in the series. 

Hyrule Field’s music invites you forward toward adventure. The song played in the Still World invokes a sense of desolation. 

While the game is near perfect, there are a few notable missteps that prevent it from being flawless.

Most glaringly, the game sometimes stutters. How is Nintendo still putting out games that don’t have steady frame rates? How is a titan in game development still getting away with ignoring an industry standard? 

Echoes of Wisdom also has a fairly repetitive soundtrack. While my praise for the soundtrack earlier was genuine, it can get a bit grating. In particular, the aforementioned Hyrule Field song is played in far too many locations. 

Finally, the user interface is clunky. Holding right on the d-pad and scrolling through Echoes with the right stick one at a time is tedious. The only other option is to open your entire list of Echoes and search for the one you want. 

I beat the game’s main story in two weeks, so I’m not that upset about these things. I’m about 25 hours in and have almost completed the game 100%. $60 might be a bit steep a price for this one considering Breath of the Wild is better and costs the same, but it’s a quality title nonetheless.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a great game in a series full of them. It did not exceed my expectations, but it met them, which is impressive for a Zelda game. I give this one a 4/5.

Tolbert can be reached at [email protected]. Tell him your favorite Zelda game.