Daily Debate: Are You Concerned that Echoes of Wisdom Will Be Too Easy?

We’ve learned a lot more about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom the past few weeks. In addition to a brand-new trailer that debuted Princess Zelda’s Bind and Reverse Bind abilities, recent developments saw the game’s Japanese website updated to include tons of information about the new Echo mechanic, which will allow Zelda to spawn items, tools, and monsters into the game world. And Nintendo’s various social media accounts have swiftly followed suit by posting various gameplay clips of Bind in action.

As I’ve taken in this deluge of new information, a few gameplay clips in particular have stuck out to me this past week. The first (starting at about 1:37 in the video below) comes from Echoes of Wisdom‘s Japanese site and shows Zelda utilizing four different types of Echoes (trampoline, bed, table, and water block) to scale an ascending tree-line. What would traditionally be a natural barrier to Link’s movements in any other 2D Zelda game is now made a trivial obstacle thanks to these Echoes, particularly the water blocks.

 

The second clip that stuck out (seen below) comes from the official Legend of Zelda X account and shows Zelda utilizing her new Bind ability to effortlessly drag a Moblin into a hole. If Zelda can pick up every minor enemy in the overworld and drag them into a hazard, I can see a lot of us taking advantage of this technique to stay well away from danger while we clear areas of monsters.

Obviously, there’s still a lot about Echoes of Wisdom that we still don’t know. But as Zelda Dungeon Senior Editor Charles Xavier so aptly put it, “After Tears of the Kingdom, I just can’t trust Nintendo to even consider making it hard to break the game with such versatile abilities.” With just a trampoline and few water blocks at our disposal, it seems that most natural barriers in the overworld will be easily bypassed. And with the Bind ability available to use in combat, it seems that most enemies can just be moved out of the way or into a deathtrap.

Beyond just an obvious comparison to Tears of the Kingdom and its versatile collection of abilities — wherein players can circumvent the “intended” solution with a clever application of Ultrahand and Recall — I’m reminded of the Nintendo DS puzzle platformer Scribblenauts when I see gameplay clips of Echoes of Wisdom. In Scribblenauts, the player can summon over 20,000 different objects into the game world in order to solve puzzles and overcome challenges. The sheer variety of objects available was certainly novel, but players of Scribblenauts quickly found that most puzzles could be solved by just summoning a jetpack. So, as the game progressed, it was up to the player to keep the gameplay fresh and engaging by experimenting with new objects instead of relying on the simplest and most intuitive solution. I fear that, with so many Echoes up Princess Zelda’s sleeve, Echoes of Wisdom will encounter the same issues as Scribblenauts.

So, given what we’ve seen thus far, are you at all concerned that Echoes of Wisdom will be too easy? Will Princess Zelda’s huge collection of Echoes and her Bind abilities make puzzles and challenges trivial? Join the debate in the comments below!

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