Though Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was technically the main event for June’s Nintendo Direct, its most interesting and important announcement came in the form of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the first major Zelda title positioning the titular heroine (often damsel) in the player’s role.
In and of itself, this announcement was stunning and exciting, historic and full of possibility. Adding to the kinetic energy of the news was the gameplay loop. Zelda would use a wand to create copies of in-game objects and enemies at her beck and call, which is a departure from the wildly active gameplay of traditional Zelda games focused on Link. Attacking moves from sword to bokoblin, movement shifts from hookshot to stacking five beds on top of each other.
It’s all very tantalizing because it turns the familiar proceedings we would expect from a tilt-shifted Link’s Awakening-like visual style into something presumably nonlinear. This weekend, Wario64, one of the remaining good Twitter accounts, posted the ESRB rating description for Echoes of Wisdom, which seemingly threw a wrench into these expectations.
Ratings descriptions are typically written in a straightforward manner to clearly explain what players will encounter, sometimes even dipping into what modern audiences might call “spoiler territory” depending on how loose your definitions are. “As Link, players use a sword and arrows to defeat enemies” is such a loaded phrase given the context of nearly forty years of history.
Is the ESRB just acknowledging what audiences might assume they’re getting into or are they identifying a key gameplay component we saw no evidence of in the game’s announcement trailer? There’s certainly precedent for the latter, so let’s assume this is a real part of Echoes of Wisdom.
On one hand, maybe we do see the only evidence of this in the trailer. At the beginning, with Zelda entombed in crystal, Link fights off Ganon for the xth time. Maybe that’s all we’ll play of Link! But what if, like I speculated as I watched the trailer for the first time, we follow Link down into the shadow, creating a game-long conversation between Zelda and Link I half-expected but never quite received the way I thought we might in Tears of the KIngdom?
It would certainly be an interesting swing, but I’m annoyed by the idea, too. For Zelda’s first foray as the main player character of a game in a series bearing her name, I want her to be the star. I want no exceptions, no concessions, no hedged bets. I just want a full runtime where Zelda gets to shine with new gameplay wrinkles to pave a new path in one of the most well-trodden franchises in video games.
