Episode 183 - Drive-By Nap - The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

So this is the podcast energy. I’m overflowing with power! Welcome
back to the podcast and to the first full episode this year! We’re
back from our now-traditional January break and talking about The
Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. This is the first full game in
the series where you play as Zelda herself since the CD-i, which
really did need to happen so we could finally stop pointing to The
Wand of Gamelon as a standout of anything. This means that while
the game hits a lot of the usual Zelda game beats, you interact
with the world in a slightly different way. Link’s tools are still
available to you in the form of sword, bombs, arrows, but it is
tied to a resource meter so you can’t play the whole game in that
way. Instead, you have the ability to spawn objects and enemies for
a more open-ended approach to combat and puzzle solving. This is
objectively cool, allowing you to use clever use of resources to
bypass obstacles and come up with clever solutions and makes combat
feel differently to other games in the series. However, this does
also impact design in a major way with puzzles needing to be more
open-ended and generic in order for you to have multiple ways of
solving them, and it can get a little samey. How the game strikes
the balance between novel, emergent gameplay and satisfying puzzle
design is largely going to come down to taste, but it’s at least an
interesting thing to have tackled by Nintendo. We’re going to be
talking about the similarities between this and other Zelda games
(and whether there are too many of them), how the more freeform
design impacts dungeons, which are the meat and potatoes of the
gameplay, and we test out a few new game design mantras about
substituting Bigfoot in for content you couldn’t finish. Thank you
for joining us again this week! We’re back and extremely ready to
tackle Fanbruary in the coming weeks, with this game being one of
those that came out last year that we just sort of missed. We have
taken the longest hiatus from talking about Zelda games we ever
have, which is maybe too much of a dedication to the series because
it’s only been a bit over a year, but it’s always interesting to
see what this particular pillar of the industry is trying to do. Do
you agree this game feels like it might be more of a cult hit? Did
you find it too similar to other Zelda games and wish they had done
more to change it up? Let us know in the comments or over on our
Discord! Next time, we begin Fanbruary by talking about Darkest
Dungeon, the turn based RPG roguelike, but don’t worry if you
haven’t gotten a submission in and would like to. We still have a
couple slots undecided, so let us know what you’d like to see us
play!