Echoes of Wisdom: Creating a Top-Down Dungeon Crawler in The Legend of Zelda Games via Learning Hidden Representations
There’s a narrative poetry to the way Zelda’s first mainline outing in her own ongoing legend is one in which her power is reshaping the world and using its rules to her advantage. It’s a framing that presents her as both a princess and a kind of dungeon master — and shows how, 40 years in, Nintendo is still finding fantastic ways to make The Legend of Zelda’s old ideas feel new.
While a more refined iteration of Chamber Dungeons could still make for a novel gaming experience, the mechanic — much like Link himself — is largely absent as we knew it in Echoes of Wisdom, the franchise’s first mainline entry to turn Zelda into the playable protagonist. Echoes of Wisdom does not completely discard the core ideas of Chamber Dungeons, but they use them from a more imaginative angle.
The game was designed to make me think more about how to move through space vertically, and the focus on learning echoes of ordinary objects made it feel like a top-down dungeon crawler. Table echoes could be used to give the short princess a boost, and stacks of heart-restoring beds could be fashioned into makeshift staircases. It felt like a crash course in the game’s stealth missions when I heard those echoes, as I was able to navigate out of a jail cell. When I was out in the open world, it was odd to see the behavioral pattern of a creature and how well I could use it in combat.
Aonuma started to wonder if it was more beneficial to place items in the game field that could be copied and pasted into the next game, or create new features for others to play, rather than just making your own dungeon and letting others play it. Anonuma felt that the copy / paste mechanic could become a new way of playing the Legend of Zelda games if they used echoes.
Some echoes — like the Boomerang Boarblin and Bombfish — basically give you a quick way of whipping up the classic Zelda weapon their names reference. But far more of them are just glowing replicas of the hostile creatures like ReDeads and Darknuts that you commonly find in Zelda overworlds and dungeons.
The Tri Rod is the most powerful weapon in the game, it can be used with a few other useful items.
Echoes of Wisdom: How echoes helped Link’s Awakening and Water Temple get a little more enjoyment out of the game
Also key to the Super Mario Maker’s success was the simple fact that user-created courses could be a lot of fun to play through, and the title as a whole was a very clever exercise in teaching basic video game design. The repetitiveness and inflexibility of chamber dungeons made Link’s Awakening not as valuable as it could have been.
You can see the influence of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in Echoes of Wisdom, Nintendo’s latest top-down Zelda game for the Nintendo Switch. The most brilliant innovation in the new game feels like an improved version of Link’s Awakening remake’s clunkiest feature.
While they are creative, they also play into Nintendo’s hands. While echoes may feel like a nerfing of the Tears mechanics, Nintendo still wanted to empower them to be mischievous. As director Tomomi Sano has said, the point is for players to find ways to use echoes that “are so ingenious it almost feels like cheating.”
On Reddit, players are sharing creations that have allowed them to bypass both gated-off areas and the laws of gravity. One worked out how to create different variations of flying machines, no bed needed, by binding together a crow, a rock, and an enemy that creates wind gusts. In the game’s water temple, which requires players to slowly raise the water level to reach the top, one enterprising adventurer figured out how to skip that whole mess by carefully stacking water blocks—echoes that create a contained cube of water Zelda can swim through—to head straight up.
One of Echoes of Wisdom’s most useful items is also its plainest: a simple, brown-framed bed. The beds are a great way to get around, they can stack a couple and make a bridge or ladder. Dispense one in a fight and Zelda can nap to recover health while summoned monsters fight on her behalf. In one instance, a player put the game character Zelda on top of a bed and summoned their opponent to create wind gusts that made it fly. It is more convenient if you want to barricade a couple of guards into their own prison.
The Legend of Zelda: Choices of Wisdom II: An Intuitive Player’s Experience with a Dungeon and a Green Machine
The producer had a different take when he got the chance to test it. He said that it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let others play it, but it’s better to have items that can be copied and pasted into the game field.
On top of a table, Princess Zelda magically binds herself to a green machine pouring gusts of wind. She moves across the screen as the air shoots up from the table and any jet engine. The Legend of Zelda:Echoes of Wisdom is the latest entry in the series, and there is a small taste of what an inventive player can do.