YouTube Series Game Maker’s Toolkit Examines Different Ways To Improve Echoes of Wisdom’s User Interface
Posted on February 11 2025 by Sean Gadus
While Echoes of Wisdom has generally received praise for its creativity and freedom, one element of the game has been a point of criticism for many fans and journalists: the game’s menu system for selecting echoes. While Nintendo did include a few options for filtering through or reordering echoes (“Last Used,” “Most Used,” “Last Learned,” “Cost,” and “Type”), using a variety of the 127 available echoes can mean spending a significant amount of time scrolling through the long horizontal list of echoes.
In the most recent video in his long-running YouTube series “Game Maker’s Toolkit,” Mark Brown discusses the issues with Echoes of Wisdom‘s user interface (UI) and workshops alternative menus for selecting echoes. Like many other critics and fans, Brown views both Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom‘s UI as lacking the creativity and efficiency that many Nintendo designs and user interfaces are known for. The first thing Brown does to examine potential improvements for Echoes of Wisdom‘s echoes menu is to recreate the echoes menu in Unity, a commonly used cross-platform game engine. After recreating the list of echoes, Brown experiments with several different potential solutions or ways to improve the selection process.
The first experiment Brown tries is to increase the speed of scrolling. In Echoes of Wisdom, the menu has a predetermined speed at which it scrolls. Brown changes this system, adding commands for the menu to scroll more quickly if the player holds down the directional button for a certain amount of time. One of the issues with increasing the speed of scrolling is that it can be hard to know where the player is on the menu when they are scrolling so quickly. In order to help with that issue, Brown created a small indicator to show where the player is on the long list. Next, Brown used the PlayStation 3 “Cross Media Bar” as inspiration for a potential solution to the long horizontal menu in Echoes of Wisdom. The PlayStation 3 uses horizontal and vertical bars to organize major categories like games, music, and movies and then the user selects from more specific items in those broad categories. In this experiment, the different echoes are collected into categories, but the use of horizontal and vertical bars reduces the amount of scrolling required.
Another way to potentially improve Echoes of Wisdom‘s UI is a grid with different tabs full of echoes; a solution that is inspired by the UI in crafting games like Minecraft. Rather than having one massive list of echoes, the player flips through six or seven different pages of echoes. This would reduce the amount of scrolling as the player would be able to generally memorize which page key echoes are on or each page could be marked with a specific symbol. The last real solution that Brown suggests is a radial menu, which is reminiscent of the quick item select system on the Wii version of Twilight Princess. A radial or wheel menu system could be used to create a more dynamic list of favorites or most used items.
Overall, Brown does not suggest or endorse one idea for improving Echoes of Wisdom‘s UI, but his video does illustrate some possible improvements to the menu system for selecting echoes. As a more general point, I hope that Nintendo takes the criticisms about the echoes select menu in mind when designing future Zelda games. The menus and UI from Zelda games prior to Breath of the Wild were extremely clean, vivid, and well-organized, and it feels like Nintendo has not quite lived up to their usual high design standards with the past few Zelda titles.
What do you think of the echoes select menu in Echoes of Wisdom? Do any of Game Maker Toolkit’s solutions appeal to you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Source: Game Maker’s Toolkit
Sean Gadus is a Senior Editor at Zelda Dungeon. His first Zelda game was Ocarina of Time, and he loves all of the 3D Zelda games from 1998-2011. He is currently playing Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for the first time (what an amazing game!). He wants to help build a kinder, more compassionate world. You can check out his other written work at The-Artifice.com.
