You should fight like a warrior and act like a princess, says Echoes of Wisdom

Zelda in the Open World (I): The Adventures of a Top Down Princess with a Swarm of Keese

It feels like the classic top-down Zelda formula has been changed by Nintendo by using many of its cleverest innovations. It is not an open world, but it is new and it is a good fit for the princess.

Because echoes are such a huge part of the game, it was surprising to see Zelda pick up Link’s sword and gain the ability to fight (and dress) the way he does. She is able to block attacks using a shield in her swordfighter form. The magic meter that controls Zelda’s transformations depletes if you leave it running for too long. While I like to think of myself as a swordfighter in the game, what I learned from the first boss battles is that swordfighting isn’t a default position when you first start playing it. You must use the sword, but it is just one of many tools you must use to overcome the multiple challenges of the game.

I had a ball summoning a swarm of Keese to sic on Moblins once I was able to get out into the open world, but it wasn’t long before I realized that brute force isn’t the easiest way to play when you start out. With just a few heart containers, it can be accomplished to knock out the demon, but you have to know how to avoid incoming attacks while also using echoes to fight for you. And because your echoes sustain damage as well, you often have to be ready to conjure new ones at just the right time in order to take out difficult enemies. There are other options for the princess.

Echoes of Wisdom: A Tale of Princess-Zelda and the Hosts of Hyrule and Moblins in Legends of Zelda

The number of echoes you can create at any given time is determined by the number of triangles floating behind Tri and a point system that assigns different costs to things you can create. While a table echo costs a single triangle, a Moblin echo requires two. You must put some thought into what you do as the battles get more complicated, because the game will automatically uninstall old echoes when you make new ones.

Even though the puzzles were relatively easy, there were a number of ways they could’ve been solved using different echoes. One approach would make other onscreen characters behave in a certain way that opens a previously blocked path, and the other would make me change my way of life by creating walkways. Some of that variability comes from the way that echoes interact with their environments by default — one monster, for example, immediately started hopping around and setting things on fire after I called it out. It stems from how ECHOES OF Wisdom encourages you to experiment.

Every Legend of Zelda game has had its quirky innovations, but Breath of the Wild revolutionized the franchise in ways that felt monumental and reflective of Nintendo being ready to try something — a number of things, really — new with Link. The openness of Breath of the Wild made it feel unlike anything we had seen before in the series, and its story brought Link to life by building a large world around him that you were meant to spend hours exploring.

After waiting for a long time while Link hacked and slashed his way through Hyrule, the creators of “Echoes of Wisdom” decided to turn Princess-Zelda into a hero as she sets out to stop Ganon. It is clear to us when we meet this Zelda that she is familiar with the dangers Ganon poses and the important role Link typically plays in the grand battle between light and dark. With Link and many other hylians being swallowed up by one of the strange portals of echoes of wisdom, she has left to her own devices to keep her kingdom out of total chaos.

The Tri Rod can be waved at certain things and monsters in order to create echos of them. Early into my demo, the echoes I learned were of ordinary things you’d find in any top-down Zelda, like a small table and a bed. But rather than simply existing as visual detail, the echoes give you a variety of ways to tackle Echoes of Wisdom’s various puzzles. A single table doesn’t seem like much at first, but a stack of them is perfect for getting Zelda up high enough to sneak out of a prison cell. And in moments when Zelda might need to hide, being able to conjure a large pot she can climb into is very handy.

The first part of the demo included Zelda’s escape from prison, where she’s just beginning to learn how to make echoes, and spilled over into a small portion of the game’s overworld. In a small village, I learned how to make a trampoline echo and used it to bounce onto rooftops. In the field, I had a spiky ball enemy to use as a battering ram. It was the second half of the demo, however—a small dungeon complete with boss-fight—that felt the most satisfying.

Although it may look like the 2019 remake of Link’s Awakening—brightly animated environments and characters with adorably big heads—it’s closer to the inventive spirit of Nintendo’s last game in the franchise, Tears of the Kingdom. After more than an hour in the game, we found that it was a playground where everyone was in charge of their own adventure.

The princess of Hyrule and the strange rifts all over the planet. Part II: The magic of the squark-brane

The princess is in jail. She was thrown into prison for her alleged involvement in the appearance of strangerifts all over Hyrule. Under normal circumstances, she’d be stuck down there until longtime hero Link could come rescue her.