The new Zelda adventure is around the corner. And it will be a breath of fresh air.
During the last Nintendo Direct, the publisher announced a new Legend of Zelda game, in which you will finally play as Zelda. And no, those CD-i games are not counting, hehe.
As a big fan of Tears of the Kingdom’s machianics and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake I’m very excited to see what Eiji Aonuma and his team cooked up this time. Here’s why I’m excited to play the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.
Playable Zelda
Let’s start with the biggest news surrounding the game. We will finally play as Zelda. All the jokes about correctly naming the main character will be over soon. Let me tell you, it’s been a long time coming.
I’m glad to see Nintendo taking this step and introducing Zelda as a playable character. After all, it doesn’t have to be the knight in the shiny who always save the princess. It will be awesome to save Link for once.
As we saw in the trailer, Link has been sucked into a rift after fighting Ganon, and its up to Zelda to figure out how to bring Hyrule to a normal state and save our green little friend.
Trirod and Echoes
Zelda will be sporting a new weapon/tool in the new game, which has some abilities I think will be interesting to see. The Trirod will be able to copy elements of the environment, like beds, chairs, pots with flowers and even blocks of water, and then materialize them anywhere you want later.
This ability very much reminds me of the abilities from Tears of the Kingdom, recall to be specific, and its a good idea. The new game is doing its own thing, while bringing well working mechanics from other title.
Echoes ability will give us tons of ways to solve problems we will encounter on our journey. I can already see skilled players using this to skip stuff and doing things the developers coul not have dreamed of. I’m definetly not one of those skilled players, but will find my ways to have a lot of fun with the new mechanic.
The world
From what we can see in the trailer the map resembles older 2D titles like A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening, but you can also spot places like Gerudo Town, Zora’s Domain as well as some staple 3D Zelda characters like The Great Deku Tree. So it seems to mix both the 3D and 2D Zelda games.
We saw tons of different places in the trailer which makes me believe the map will be bigger than it is in the Link’s Awakening remake. More like A Link to the Past, and who knows, maybe even bigger.
The trailer did not show much about the dungeons, so I hope some kind of surprise could be on the way. I would love to see something new about this staple of the series. But if its just good old dungeons? Well, nothing you can do. I wish for a lot of them, and I wish they will be as fun as the other 2D Zelda’s dungeons.
The graphics
Let me start by saying that Link’s Awakening, is my favorite Zelda game ever. And I loved that Nintendo decided to remake this game, it was a big surprise. And now the new Zelda gets the same graphics engine, which made me feel right at home in the new trailer. I remember some people were not so happy about the Link model in the remake, and I get that. I didn’t mind anything about the new artstyle though. It suits both games in my opinion. And it makes me feel the new Zelda will be friendly to younger players, like the Link’s Awakening was.
If its actually a bigger map in Echoes of Wisdom and it will keep a steady 60FPS I will be impressed. Even after 7 years, the games on the Switch can look great, when the devs know how to play with strenghts and weaknesses of such an old system. Makes me wonder how beautiful the new games on the next console will be.
Summary
The new Zelda game is going to be a hit. Eiji Aonuma has my eternal trust after bringing us so many fantastic games, especially the last two Zelda’s. A bit controvertial you might say, but I do love these games. I’m looking forward to the new mechanics, playing as Zelda, and going back to the cartoonish 2D Hyrule.
