Empyrean's review of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

The Legend of Link: Echoes of Beds Nintendo have been doing this strange thing for a while where they create some wildly inventive and fun core mechanics and slap them on the bones of a very tired and dull game. They did this with Mario Wonder, to a lesser extent with Tears of the Kingdom, and now here with Echoes of Wisdom. Make no mistake: with the exception of the awful menu management, the echoes (whilst very unbalanced) and sense of freedom is wonderful. The first time you realise you can jump on a trampoline and go beyond what you would expect to be out of bounds is new ground for 2D Zelda. Unfortunately everything else is so egregiously played out and uninspired that I often found it hard to enjoy myself. This is just every pre-Wilds era game you’ve played but with a lot of TotK sloppily pasted in. Even playing as Zelda isn’t as refreshing as it should be as she’s little more than a Link stand-in, and very not much would change if you swap the roles. A big step back after the great strides in development the previous Zelda had. Echoes isn’t a bad game at all, but it’s certainly one of the most disappointing entries in the franchise. Nintendo really need to double down on reinventing their franchises, like they did with BotW, rather than just adding some unique bells and whistles.