Game Theory: Echoes Of Wisdom is Nintendo's latest effort to blow up The Legend Of Zelda

It’s been clear, for about a decade now, that the designers creating Nintendo’s various Zelda games were getting kind of sick of the franchise’s basic formula. We refer, generally, to the  Zelda dungeon template that was codified way back in 1991’s The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, and which you likely remember from half a dozen different games: Go to a dungeon, run into a bunch of obstacles that can only be surpassed via a grappling hook/big-ass-hammer/magic stick you don’t have yet, get said object, use it to solve the dungeon. There have been a lot of Zelda games that have made great use of this template, including some of the franchise’s most celebrated installments. But at the end of the day, it’s also an idea that leaves dungeon design, ostensibly one of the Zelda‘s strong suits, largely beholden to the quality of any given tool. Give Link a fun new toy, get a fun dungeon; stick him with some boring glove upgrade so he can throw bigger rocks, and the concept can suffer a bit. Meanwhile, that same idea—of using new toys as keys to forward progress—means the game can’t be especially generous with them, or else its whole progression loop is screwed. And what’s fun about being stingy with your toys?

As we noted in last week’s return installment of Best, Worst, Weirdest, Zelda broke with that basic tradition with 2013’s A Link Between Worlds, which dropped the whole idea of a steadily growing roster of tools, in favor of having the whole arsenal available from the jump. It’s an idea that’s carried forward into the series’ 3D Switch games, Breath Of The Wild and its direct sequel Tears Of The Kingdom, both of which give you all of Link’s basic verbs right out the gate. (Including, in the case of Tears, the “pick-up-anything-and-glue-it-together” Ultrahand, maybe the single coolest tool in the entire series.) Now that “Why wouldn’t we want our players to be doing the fun thing, the whole time?” ethos has found a new expression, in the just-released Echoes Of Wisdom, a game that is radical, not because it finally lets you play as the series’ titular damsel, but because it turns nearly everything in the game world into a tool.

Echoes, which models itself on the style of 2019’s gorgeous Link’s Awakening remake, but sports a far-more wild heart, starts with a bait-and-switch, giving you just a taste of a Link in his prime, doing typical Zelda shit: Tossing bombs, firing arrows, swinging swords, murdering pigs. It only starts to get interesting, though, after play switches to the rescued Zelda, who soon finds herself a) a wanted fugitive in her own kingdom, and b) in possession of the Tri Rod, a magical device that allows her to create copies of objects, and, more importantly, creatures that she encounters.

Don’t get us wrong: The object thing is neat, as Echoes Of Wisdom applies the Breath Of The Wild “if you can see it, you can climb it” concept to the typically more rigid 2D Zelda format. (The first time you realize you can stick together a makeshift staircase of beds to get up on top of cliffs that would traditionally be screen boundaries in other games of this style is a game-changer.) But it’s the ability to convert monsters you’ve killed into new soldiers/tools that makes the game feel like a genuine attempt at breaking the Zelda mold. There’s still a sense of progress, as you explore deeper into the rift-ravaged kingdom, finding new beasties to murder/convert into your loyal soldiers. (With the ability to control more and bigger enemies gated by how many of the rifts you’ve cleared.) But finding new ways to use your deadly little troopers—like, say, using your telekinesis tool to link Zelda’s movement to a wall-climbing spider, so that it drags her up right alongside it, or turning a mole into your personal shovel—provokes that same feeling of finding ways to break a game that wants to be broken that made Breath, and especially Tears, so amazingly freeing.

Mind you, we don’t love every element imported from the recent Switch games to this new installment: Maybe we’re just broken-souled weirdos who don’t properly appreciate fine cuisine, but we didn’t feel like this style of Zelda game was necessarily missing cooking—or the various design decisions attached to it, including getting food ingredients as rewards that could have been something cooler, and the fact that enemies hit like Mack trucks to justify you needing to lug around a backpack full of health-restoring smoothies. (Also, Echoes retains Breath and Tears‘ shameless willingness to let you bury yourself in a 50-entry menu as you go digging around for the one tool you desperately need.) But these feel like small quibbles, in the face of Zelda continuing to execute one of the most fascinating re-inventions in gaming: Transforming from a series where you basically always knew what you were going to get, into some of Nintendo’s most aggressively weird design in decades. All that, and it looks cute as a button, too.