{"id":90845,"date":"2025-05-06T14:24:17","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T18:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=90845"},"modified":"2025-05-06T14:24:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-06T18:24:17","slug":"echoes-of-wisdom-is-merely-ok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=90845","title":{"rendered":"Echoes of Wisdom is Merely OK"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I played The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (as a distraction to avoid losing my mind reading the last giant batch of lab reports for the semester) since I finally found a copy for a vaguely reasonable price a few weeks ago, and will play anything from the franchise.  It&#8217;s&#8230; OK.  Thoughts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The main echo gimmick is novel and mostly positive; \n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>it&#8217;s narratively a neat way to have the player character (who is Zelda) not get their hands dirty<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>it&#8217;s pretty clear when you can learn something, and which things on screen are your echoes<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>it&#8217;s fun to try applying different echoes to situations<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8230;but it involves a <em>ton<\/em> of menuing, which their attempts to make affordances for don&#8217;t quite cover up<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>and there are quite a few points where it&#8217;s aggravating to get an echo to do what you clearly need it to<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The game is pretty short.  A bit unsatisfyingly so. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The vast majority of puzzles are highly telegraphed and fairly trivial (most are <em>just<\/em> interesting enough to be satisfying) and a few are &#8220;go look up what obnoxious detail makes the obvious solution frustrating to execute&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The minor characters and side quests are not very interesting, which is something Zelda games are usually better at\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>I went in and played a bunch of side content after I beat the game, just looking for interest. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Several of the mechanics just&#8230;aren&#8217;t very useful: \n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>If you can find a safe spot, you can always heal with a bed, so smoothies matter once for cold resistance and otherwise only if you need to heal during a boss because you did something dumb.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Once you have clouds, the other platforming-related echoes are largely irrelevant. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I&#8230; didn&#8217;t even bother with Dampe and the automatons until I went back to mop up stuff I missed after I finished.  It feels more like an alternate pitch to the echo system that they didn&#8217;t quite let go of.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s not a bad game, but don&#8217;t pay full price.<br \/>Given that the 3D Zeldas for the Switch (BoTW and ToTK) were excellent, do those first if you haven&#8217;t.  And if you specifically want a 2D Zelda-like and you haven&#8217;t played <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tunic_(video_game)\">Tunic<\/a> (which is a 2D Zelda influenced game whose magenta otherworldly corruption feels like it might have fed back into the franchise with this one), do that first, it&#8217;s more interesting.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I played The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (as a distraction to avoid losing my mind reading the last giant batch of lab reports for the semester) since I finally found a copy for a vaguely reasonable price a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=90845\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}