My main problem with this game is how it has maybe six or so useful things you’ll be spamming most of the time for convenience.
I was on board with the concept, but they didn’t carry it far enough. There were simply not enough situations requiring clever use of items, and most items/monsters felt useless compared to a few that just worked better in most situations.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom did a really good job of creating open-ended problems and letting you experiment with all the tools you got. I think Echoes of Wisdom should have focussed more on that.
The fact you can at any moment trigger a time-limited Link mode which is basically standard LoZ combat and makes the game ridiculously easy is a sign they did not believe in their concept enough. If your main gameplay loop becomes so tedious you implement shortcuts to avoid it, you’ve done something wrong.
Yeah, some battles got really tedious. Additionally once you have a couple key echoes there wasn’t really much puzzle element anymore, everything felt solvable with two or three echoes.
Never even finished it because it felt so repetitive. Personally I think the “openness” of the world was a detraction. Part of the fun of zelda/metroidvanias is finding out how new skills expand the map and also help make puzzles progressive. By opening up the map all puzzles default to generic solutions.
Fair criticism. I try to avoid using Link mode, but boss fights are so tedious without it.
That said, I actually prefer Echoes of Wisdom to BotW because it has actual dungeons again, but it does feel a bit lazy to drop into slashing and shooting.
Hmm, the referenced water block doesn’t sound that great. In fairness, I have’t played the game, but the article is light on examples:
In no time at all, you realise with eye-widening, no, surely not possibility that if you create two water blocks on the same spot, they’ll spool skywards into a tall, liquid column.
Not to be a joyless cynic, but this seems less impressive than time, terrain, Iron Boots, or other gimmicks from past Zelda games that expand the existing map…
It’s somewhat useful, but it’s not my favourite way to overcome obstacles because swimming is very slow and kinda janky.
The thing is, in theory, you’ve got several echoes and strategies that would let you cross a ravine or climb up a cliff. For example there’s several floating monsters that can carry you, one that you can grab as it climbs walls, and those flying tiles from aLttP that you can ride (that one’s kinda cool. I wanted more like that).
Water cube is just the one that works in almost all situations. And a big problem in this game is that it’s a pain to switch echoes all the time, so water cube is one of the few you’ll have in speed dial most of the time.
flying tiles from aLttP that you can ride (that one’s kinda cool. I wanted more like that)
Same. Pretty soon after I got it, I was able to largely skip a stupid stealth section by flying across bookcases. I also use it when I’m too lazy to go the long way and just want to cross a gap for a chest or something.
And a big problem in this game is that it’s a pain to switch echoes all the time
Agreed. I wish I could tag 10 or so for quick access and assign to a ring switcher thing. I ended up using about that many over and over, because it’s such a pain to go find the one in the middle I want to mess with.
Or maybe they could group them or something? Like mobs, scenery, furniture, etc? Having some way to get to other echoes might encourage me to experiment a bit more.
And a big problem in this game is that it’s a pain to switch echoes all the time
It really really is. It’s one of the things I noticed in the trailer and just hoped they would have a solution for once I got to play the game.
The game has a hundred or so echoes, and you can solve puzzles in different ways, but some require a very specific echo and some require any, so you basically just use the same half dozen echoes. When you have to switch, it sucks, and so when you don’t have to switch you just spam water block or whatever.
It seems like the devs just implemented the echo switching as is and assumed they’d fix it later… But they never did.
It’s a fun game but the chances of me replaying it are near zero. Skyward Sword had a similar problem with Fi, although I understand they’ve mostly fix that in the remaster.
