Over the last week, I’ve poured nearly twenty hours into Nintendo’s new game The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Unless something changes in the last couple of dungeons, it’s the strongest contender so far for my personal game of the year. It’s a triumphant blend of gentle design homages to the history of Zelda games with fresh new ideas inspired by their most recent open world hits — and also a surprisingly good action platformer.
I guess “good jumping” is part of the Nintendo DNA, but I don’t usually expect it from a Zelda game. I’ve seen lots of weird swirling discussions online about whether or not this counts as a “true” installment in the franchise, and while I guess I understand where that debate comes from, make no mistake: this is absolutely a must-play Zelda. If you’ve only ever seen the open world Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom then no, Echoes doesn’t have as much content as those…but that’s a weird way to disqualify this from canonical status.
If you take this argument from the other side, it’s easy to see where it falters. Looking back at its top down graphical forebears instead of the big open world experiences, Echoes is a dramatically bigger and more mechanically rich game. It takes the classic Zelda designs and infuses them into a larger open world that borrows a lot of depth and intricacy from the “big” Switch…
