4/5 ★ – DanteSnowcone's review of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

Friendship ended with Beedle, now Stamp Guy is my best friend #plunk Echoes of Wisdom offers the creativity of the modern Zelda games in the world of classic Zelda with the gorgeous art style of the Link’s Awakening remake — a safe combination for Grezzo to work some magic with. It’s a great game that does approach the point of tedium by the end, but I really enjoyed it and did almost everything there was to do. The echo mechanic of the game is pretty cool! You can create hundreds of different objects to solve puzzles and fight enemies, and just like Tears of the Kingdom, any solution is the correct solution. I relied heavily on beds and water blocks to solve basically everything, but there is clearly a lot of variability in how you can do most things, and only a couple echoes exist for a single purpose. Other than the obvious role reversal, the main quest is nothing new. Help the different tribes, go through some temples, fight some bosses. Nothing here stood out to me in terms of writing or concept, but I have to say I adore this rendition of deku scrubs, calling everybody a bumpkin and eating “cotton candy.” Good stuff. I do wish the combat were better. It’s a little telling that you can turn into Link to use the sword and arrows basically any time you want to. At first I would do it just because he can jump a little higher, but after I got the high-jump charm I used Link when fights got too frustrating and I wanted to just end them. I think that a lot of thought went into which enemies could outmaneuver or overwhelm others, but truly nothing was better than just spamming the same enemy over and over again so that there would be no rest time between their attacks. Most of the bosses and mini-bosses were pretty good, but after fighting an enemy once to score its echo there was really no energy or fun in basic encounters at all. The side content was pretty varied and enjoyable. Most quests were quick and easy, but some turned into decent expeditions. I especially liked the sleep dojo and the stamp hunt. Rewards for secret hunting were often lackluster (20 rupees, five apples, etc.) but I just learned to be in it for the journey, not the destination. I was surprised by how many pieces of heart were just … there, with no struggle to find them whatsoever. I feel like it would have made more sense to put heart pieces in the chests and the random rupees or smoothie ingredients all over the place, but I guess since Zelda cannot actually fight it’s best for her to get more health sooner. It’s definitely not genre-defining like BotW or TotK, and it’s sadly also not better than the last top-down Zelda, A Link Between Worlds. But it’s still a lot of fun, and as far as I know there’s nothing else quite like it. It also breaks up the time between their major releases, and I hope that Nintendo sees a market for more top-down Zelda games and keeps making them. Time Played: 30 hours