The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom out now on Switch

[RolStoppable]

The game I would call the most comparable to Echoes of Wisdom is Paper Mario: The Origami King. All the ingredients for a great game are there, but one boneheaded decision regarding the core gameplay drags everything down. For TOK it was the removal of RPG staples like EXP and combat abilities during the turn-based battles which were all already proven to work splendidly in the first two Paper Mario games. For EoW it's the removal of the sword (or any conventional weapon, because Zelda could have been given something other than a sword).

Due to the lack of a weapon, EoW feels all too often like you have to take an extra step to get something done. Instead of hitting an enemy directly, you have to summon something. At its core it's also absolutely idiotic to advertise a game as offering so many choices when the most basic and obvious choice is being taken away from the player. There's no "you can play this game like you want" like in Breath of the Wild, here it's a "you have to play it like we want you to." This culminates in the final phase of the story where

Spoiler!

Link comes on the team and takes his weapons back. He then assists you up to and including the final battle where the developers rub it in your face what this game could have been if you were ever given full control of a sword, bow and bombs. You play as Zelda and summon dumb monsters while Link does most of the work and you just watch him go wild.

It's so infuriating.

What's left is a decent to good game which is not the level of quality you'd like to see and expect from a Zelda game. This is the kind of Zelda that Aonuma would love to make until the end of time. It becomes glaringly obvious when

Spoiler!

you tackle the sleep challenges in Kakariko Village. The ones where you can use the sword have extremely generous time limits whereas the ones where you can't use your sword require you to plan carefully if you want the extra bonus for not only beating the target time, but also doing it especially fast. It's as if this made for people who have a very hard time with action-based gameplay, i.e. Eiji "I can't beat the first dungeon in the original Zelda" Aonuma.

Top-down Zelda games are faster to make than 3D Zelda games, but we are getting them at a slower rate anyway. Makes it sting all the more that this is this decade's new top-down Zelda. A Link Between Worlds had its shortcomings, but it did a lot more things right than Echoes of Wisdom.

Lastly, can Nintendo please move on from using A Link to the Past's overworld? They seriously embedded it in Echoes of Wisdom's center with a bunch of alterations, but it's still easy enough to recognize.