KCF0107

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Switch)

It's not a good game, but the second half of the game showed enough promise that a follow-up could work with heavy improvements.

The novelty of the echo system wore off pretty quick. Once you start to collect several echoes, the UI becomes a chore. They only show up in a long horizontal line, so any sorting method and even just a list of favorites (which became a hassle on its own), didn't help. Combat with echoes is also problematic.

Each echo is assigned an amount of, I don't know what it's called, echo energy maybe, denoted by a number of triangles and you only have so many in your triangle pool. You can level up to get a slight increase in your pool, but basically throughout the game, you will have between 1-3 echoes simultaneously in combat situations. I found most of them to suck in combat. They all have delays and windups in their attack, and locking on to enemies did not cause them to attack them as they did what they wanted. In the case of numerous enemy types and bosses, the timing of when to summon an echo was everything, which was very stupid to me when I basically have to keep re-summoning echoes to get their attack windup just right or they will just contribute nothing to the fight.

Zelda can fight, and makes things go a lot smoother, but it uses a special meter that drains much faster than you would think/hope, and the means of replenshing that meter basically come from infrequent, special circumstances or you have to buy and consume smoothies, their version of potions, and they must be ones that specifically replenish that meter since smoothies all have different effects. So yeah, the echo system and combat are a mess, and sink this game, but the flaws are clear and can easily be cleaned up if they return to this well.

That being said, I really enjoyed the second half dungeons, and the puzzle application of echoes is relatively strong in this game. Once the game opened up in terms of echoes at your disposal and higher echo summoning pool, exploration was really neat. I'm pretty sure that I broke sequence in two dungeons, and I entered an entire region through a silly way and never explored the main western side that you were supposed to enter from lol.