♫ Music: Suthorn Village ♫
~Winner of the "Best Outdoor Stamp Rally" Award~
When it comes to video game problem solving, I think I prefer being handed a relatively limited number of tools with specific uses over real freeform creativity. In Advance Wars, my favorite battles were always the maps with lots of units pre-deployed and little unit production, versus the War Room style of nothing but unit production. While playing Echoes of Wisdom, I couldn't help remembering Tears of the Kingdom and its robust construction system, and thinking how much more the former clicked with me. I'm not a terribly engineering-minded person, I suppose, but finding unorthodox solutions feels more rewarding when being able to do anything isn't the default. Echoes certainly draws from Tears, Zelda's tether power that lets you swap which object in the link can move the other feels straight out of the BotW/TotK tablet abilities, and of course the irksome menus that literally were pulled straight from those other two games. But Echoes strikes an excellent balance of scale and flexibility.
Those menus really are the worst, though. The game showers you with new toys that might not necessarily grant you a new verb but do at least look cute, and then they get lost in the dozens of other echoes you've acquired. The developers assert the menu design was thought through and intentional; they did not want to implement a Favorites menu because then the average player would use nothing but the basic bed the entire game, living in their favorites. They wanted people to have to scroll through the big list of echoes so they might see a potential solution they hadn't considered. But I think for many people the reality is that they just used the Most Used filter as a half-assed Favorites, maybe dipping into Recently Acquired when needed. I kinda get where the developers are coming from, but I think even something like a spiral menu would've been more visually engaging to scroll through than a straight horizontal line. Even so, this is a pretty minor complaint. The character designs and dungeons and the depth of optional content (whole mini-dungeons with whole bosses!) combined with the gleeful celebration of Zelda enemies via the echoes make this one of my favorite Zeldas.
Platform: Switch
