Holism: Echoes of Wisdom and the Tri Rod

Thanks to Cart Boy for edits.

The mountainous regions of Hyrule are always a dangerous place. Death Mountain holds the secret lair of Ganon and spews volcanic discharge. The Hebra Mountain Range can freeze an adventurer solid and is blanketed in snowfall. But at times in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, walking through Eldin Volcano seems the scariest trek of all. Princess Zelda suffers all the standard problems of this kind of video game biome—pools of lava, powerful enemies, perilous climbs—but they feel more acute. See, in a normal Legend of Zelda game, you fight these challenges head-on, especially in the case of the enemies. Zelda, however, can’t. She lacks a sword like Link, the series’ stalwart hero. She has no Hookshot or godly climbing talent. Fortunately, you’re never alone when you’ve got the magical Tri Rod, an item that can magic up objects and enemies with absolute ease. It makes you not a warrior but a tactician. So you’ll get a Lizalfos to fight a gang of Zols, throw a slab of meat to entice a hungry Moblin, or throw out a pot to hide in, safe from the eyes of a Hyrulean guard.

And sometimes, you’ll drop a whole stack of beds.

Image: Source Gaming. If Zelda doesn’t wield a bed in the next Super Smash Bros., what are we even doing?

The path to Echoes of Wisdom reveals its brilliance. It started life as a loose project by Grezzo, a studio most-known for remakes and remasters of previous Zelda games Off the success of their sumptuous Link’s Awakening remake, they and Nintendo became invested in their taking the lead on an original, mainline series entry. While the entire staff came up with dozens of ideas, the project soon coalesced around a sort of “copy-and-paste gameplay” in which players would conjure up preexisting assets. This initially was used in a Super Mario Maker-esque dungeon editor that was ultimately scrapped. But the appeal was clear, especially after the team became comfortable letting it exist outside dungeons and for combat. It’s a gamification of editing, and since that’s something Nintendo had also been exploring in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it fit within the company’s current focus. But this came with a few questions, one Echoes explores well, if not always perfectly. What kinds of problems can we come up with? Can we create multiple satisfying solutions, including ones the player could invent on their own? And why should players care when they could just slash at anything in front of them?

Image: Source Gaming. Getting an Echo for the first time. If it’s an object, you need to be next to it. If it’s an enemy, you need to defeat it once. The time between seeing something you can use and getting it is generally very short.

The last one appears to have been the easiest to solve: simply remove the player’s combat abilities. You can’t fight, so you have to engage with the system. This ended up dovetailing nicely with a decades-long fan request that Zelda be a playable character after decades on the supporting side. The job of series protagonist Link is to essentially be an avatar of the player’s exploratory courage—he, Zelda, and the villain Ganon all embody aspects of the franchise’s lore and gameplay. His personality often begins and ends at “sword,” and removing his sword might leave him even more of a cipher than normal. But without that bone-deep connection, Zelda can lead a different kind of Zelda game (and it doesn’t hurt that her aspect, wisdom, fits gameplay that encourages inventive solutions). She does have a special form to give her Link’s weapons, but it’s on a timer, restricted, and ultimately less exciting than the Tri Rod. Use it for the heavyweight bosses, but I’d advise you to stretch your imagination the rest of the time.

Image: Source Gaming. Two ReDeads—an actual one and an Echo—engaging in perfectly symmetrical violence. The Echo’s the one on the left; it has that golden sheen and the triangles showing how much it costs to summon.

This naturally leads to the issue of what challenges to create. Combat is the most immediate since Zelda’s self-defense is limited to tossing rocks or crates. Typically you’ll summon enemies you’ve defeated like a wily necromancer, all of whom follow consistent rules or behaviors and can be used after you defeat one of their number. The Crow from Majora’s Mask will peck at foes and cause money to fly off them. ReDeads scream and freeze targets, just as they’ve done in past games. Octoroks have a strict rate of fire, Wolfos and Wizzrobes telegraph their attacks, and Darknuts are always aggressive. Some enemies can only exist or fight on land or in water, so if you summon a Moblin underwater it will immediately and slightly horrifically drown. Of course, this might keep Zelda too safe, so there are further tweaks. Enemies do far, far more damage than they do in other entries to keep you running and summoning, and they can take down your Echoes without too much trouble. You’ve gotta regularly spawn allies, all of whom use the very attacks they’ve used against you.

Image: Source Gaming. A battle with Volvagia off of Ocarina of Time. If you needed any more encouragement to send minions after him, he makes whole swaths of the arena too hot to touch.

The more traditional kinds of puzzles, things like stepping on giant buttons or uncovering a chest with a key inside, are still here. They’re more open ended, so you’re typically tasked with hitting a target: clamber up this wall, sneak past these guards, hit this switch. The stuff in your way are things like bottomless pits or iron bars. Because these pretty much all allow for multiple solutions, they lack some of the specificity of more classic Zelda adventures, but the best of them feel rewarding. It was wonderful to get through a stealth sequence by simply trapping a guard with boxes, or to put out fires with a rain-summoning frog when I could’ve simply found a way around them. A particular favorite involved building a complex process to activate two switches at once in the requisite ice dungeon, after which I realized I had skipped over an entirely optional room next door that makes the puzzle far simpler. Not a cheese, not a skip, just my own drive to solve something. This is an advantage of the main dungeons having more structured design than the fully open-ended ones Nintendo has used in the recent 3D games, so rooms—that one from earlier being an exception—can be largely one-off affairs you explore, complete in your own way, and leave.

Image: Source Gaming. The 2D sections that comprise a lot of dungeon architecture—right out of Link’s Awakening—are on the whole less interesting. But it’s extremely cool how aggressively the team translated the mechanics, to the point where distance, elements, and, in this case, gravity are fully parsable.

Beyond that, the world itself is something of a puzzle. As was the case in Tears and its predecessor Breath of the Wild, Hyrule is a gorgeous, contiguous playground where you’re finding new ways to get around. Rent a horse, copy a carrot, and make an Echo of it to call the steed. Kill a flying enemy, grab it, and glide down a mountain. Jump off trampolines, make a walkway of tall shrubbery, or plop down that staircase of beds. A particular favorite is the water block, which can be stacked to make a tower, used to pull up buoyant objects, or summoned on top of an enemy to instantly drown them. The Zelda and Mario franchises have always had close ties, and this game is the franchise at its most like Super Mario 64. A giant garden to play in. Beyond the shockingly high level of damage enemies deal, there isn’t a ton of hard pushback; I opened about ninety percent of the map before completing the third dungeon of about seven. Very different from the Hyrule of those open world Zeldas, which are awash with friction and danger (though it doesn’t take too long to find the bones of old games). The most threat I encountered in the overworld was in the super-cold Hebra Mountain near the end of the adventure. Its cold wind was damaging, a rare example of environmental damage, but again, there are multiple ways of dealing with it.

Image: Source Gaming. It also helps that traversal is really fun, whether you’re creating pathways, leaping over terrain that would fully hinder you in older Zelda games, or flying around.

This also creates an interesting reward structure. Echoes of Wisdom, like all Zelda games, is littered with useful things hidden away inside caves, chests, and conspicuous floral patterns. Stuff like Rupees and Heart Containers that are both rewards and tools to help you reach more rewards. However, along the way you may also find objects or monsters you can make Echoes of, and those are often more exciting. Several enemies are extremely useful for specific purposes, like causing fire or explosions, so these obstacles can be turned into tools of exploration. And because you can explore so much of the map so early on, it’s possible to get useful or “overpowered” Echoes quickly. Fairly early on, I found an optional cave whose final room featured a highest level version of a Darknut, a longstanding and notoriously belligerent series enemy. So when I walked into the room, I did the sanest thing, which was to stick two rocks to stop him from walking into the tiny hall I was in and slowly pepper him with other enemies. Eventually I felled him and got an Echo for my trouble.

Image: Source Gaming. Look at this brilliance o’ mine. I did eventually get tired of him killing all my low level enemies, though, and I eventually sent a powerful Deku Baba to nosh on him.

Unfortunately, it was unusable, and that leads us into another element: limitations on the player. Zelda needs some kind of block to keep her from spawning so many things that she can just override any challenge (and while I personally suffered none of them, the game’s performance issues are thoroughly documented, so there’s another reason to keep her from making a vast army of copies). In Tears of the Kingdom, the upper limit of how many things you could stick together was high enough that most players wouldn’t hit the cap, but here it’s much, much smaller. Zelda’s companion Tri has a certain number of notches with them, little triangles literally called “▲” that float behind them. Every Echo costs a certain number of ▲, and if you pull out stuff when you’ve reached your limit, the older stuff will get removed to make room. It’s clear, immediately visible, and inherently limiting. You can stretch this, though; Tri has a rudimentary experience gauge and gets new abilities, like getting another ▲ or lowering the price for certain Echoes. You level them up by completing dungeons and Rifts, strange alien spaces that are gobbling up Hyrule. When I got that Darknut Lv. 3, I only had four ▲, and he costs five. Later on I got that upgrade, and I relished siccing him on lesser Darknuts.

Image: Source Gaming. This higher level Moblin is a lot more powerful, so it’s often more economical to use one really strong Echo over a bunch of weak ones. Often… but not always.

One of the things that makes this work is that there are consistent mechanics with the Echoes, albeit small ones and not anything on the level of Breath of the Wild’s dynamic element system. It’s a delight to realize that if you cast a hunk of meat, you can throw it to distract enemies… but if you take that opportunity to cast a monster to fight for you, it’ll ignore the enemies to get a piece of the food, too. Objects make noise, so during one of the game’s surprisingly common stealth segments you can throw a pot to distract guards, then make another one to hide in, Solid Snake-style. You can entrap opponents with rocks, as I did with that guard and that Darknut. Fire consistently burns wooden things and lights dark spaces. The most notable example, though, is the bed, as you can take a nap and slowly—slowly—heal, even midway through a battle if you’ve summoned helpers to distract all the baddies. There are even beds of different quality that heal you more quickly. I used this technique to great effect in the final boss; my allies lasted just long enough for me to get in a few quick snoozes.

Image: Source Gaming. The stealth sections of the game have been less well received, largely because they’re still very standard video game stealth sections. But I love that so many mechanics are usable, from hiding to clambering up walls to outright trapping guards.

While the Echoes are the main event, the Tri Rod does have another power. Bind allows Zelda to connect to an object from afar, dragging it to other areas and letting her drop enemies into the ocean, lava, or bottomless pits. If the Echoes are the fantasy version of copy and paste, this is the drag tool, because again this is a game about bringing you into the editing process. It’s more blunt in its function, often most useful for directing your cronies around or moving preexisting stuff. That being said, it is still fun to use, especially since Binding and moving enemies doesn’t actually stop them from, say, throwing spears right into you or spouting fire wherever they go. I personally recommend pulling out a Peahat and dragging it around like a power saw.

Image: Source Gaming. Using Bind to simply drop a Freezard into one of the bottomless Rifts eating up the kingdom. See ya, pally.

There are limitations here. While the tiny systems are all delights, the game lacks the sheer breadth of systemic design that Breath and Tears have, so it’s rare for the systems to interact and they only really do on your terms. It’s also more narratively segmented; like A Link to the Past, it uses an accordion structure in which you go from one required dungeon to a few you can do in any order. It’s a fine format, but it leads to strange bits like having to wait for the plot to dictate when a dungeon will appear, and it doesn’t entirely fit the ability to explore everything immediately. Bind has another function that lets you follow an object instead of the reverse, but its uses are so limited it’s easy to forget that it exists. And eventually, your backlog of Echoes will swell to such a degree that sifting through it is a lot on its own. Giving players something like a favorites list would go a long way to making that process more comfortable.

Image: Source Gaming. A look at my list of Echoes from early in the game. It was already fairly large by this point, but it only exploded in size from here. Even after having beaten the game, I’m unsure I found every Echo available.

Though that could also knock into an issue Nintendo has less power to stop, namely that it’s easy to fall into patterns of relying on a few favorites. It’s undeniable that some Echoes are just more useful, malleable, or intuitive, even taking into account the fact that many enemies have higher level versions of themselves. You’ll find your Keese swarm or ReDead assault or that Level 3 Darknut and just use them. Naturally, it’s easy to rely on the simplest tools for getting over obstacles, which is why the common wooden bed—short enough to hop on, long enough to make a stairway, light enough to float on water, and only costs one ▲ each—is possibly the single most useful Echo in the game. If you go out of your way to use them, you’ll find that most Echoes have multiple uses thanks to those smaller systems. But the onus is on you to discover that. This exists in pretty much every video game built around open-ended problems, and while there could be ways of fixing it (restricting how many times you can summon a specific Echo, for instance), none of them would necessarily work here. The best response is to find ways to organically suppress the easy fix, like having a fire dungeon whose lava burns wooden beds or plopping in a powerful Wizzrobe who tanks all your allies’ hits. One late game boss seems to account for this by choosing attacks that counter the Echo you’re using and forcing you to switch regularly. These do exist; there could also stand to be a few more instances of them.

Image: Source Gaming. A different problem is the unintentional consequence of something very deliberate, that enemies and Echoes both have very predictable AI. It’s fine for my low level Keese here to constantly miss their attacks, but it can rankle when your powerful Wizzrobe keeps hitting way off the mark.

The other issue is the rare times where the game isn’t open-ended and expects a specific solution. It’s uncommon but there, and the worst example is an early mini-boss that absolutely requires you to use Bind and can’t be overcome any other way. Having a few instances of specific demands in an otherwise open game isn’t a bad thing, but they need to be heavily signposted and this one is not at all. Others are a bit better, like a tough mini-boss who’s weak to the ice enemies you’ve hopefully copied; the secret isn’t really telegraphed or shown earlier on, but there are several of those frozen friends, all of whom can be used as an experiment. This is ultimately a problem of communication, and I suspect it comes from Nintendo and Grezzo wanting to be hands off. Perhaps a cutscene or a simple version of the puzzle could be used in advance.

Image: Source Gaming. All it takes is one flaming monster to make a wildfire.

For all of these issues, Echoes of Wisdom is a very inventive game, and a great show for Grezzo. It’s a strange one, too, one of the bigger outliers in a franchise whose big outliers are having a moment. There’s an irony to the fact that Zelda can’t directly fight but can wield a level of power Link never could—and, perhaps, it’s an explanation for why Ganon always tries to get her first. The Tri Rod lends itself to fun, tricky solutions or goofy anecdotes, like seeing your perfect staircase burn up before you can use it or summoning a monster only for it to be utterly outclassed. The game’s funny, it’s thoughtful, and it pushes you. And that doesn’t even get into the giant swath of Zelda history it plays with, whether as enemies (tons of one-off monsters are here, typically to provide a specific or unique mechanic) or characters or environments. These are toys to play with in a gorgeous toy box of a world.

Image: Source Gaming. Between its world, the great game feel of summoning, and the sense of energy, Echoes is also extremely tactile and physical in that classic Nintendo mold. Messing around in the world and scheming up things to do is fun on its own, which is the most important part.

But perhaps more than anything else, it makes me wonder where else Nintendo could take this new creative focus. Because it doesn’t look like this is going away, and there’s so much potential. Expanding Mario Maker into Mario Kart or Fire Emblem or Pikmin level editors? Manipulating the entire world of a new 3D Mario while you explore it, like Link altering the Divine Beasts from the inside? Maybe a Metroid built around powers that affect the things around Samus more than upgrading her directly? Surely not a Splatoon with a more granular manipulation of ink? Ideas like these and so many more may be just on the horizon, and Echoes of Wisdom shows their worth.