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The Nintendo Switch’s best days are behind it. When it launched in 2017, Nintendo’s hybrid handheld and home console might have seen like a gamble, but as of August 2024, it’s the company’s second best-selling console and directly responsible for the handheld renaissance that produced things like the Steam Deck, Sony’s weird PlayStation Portal, and in part, the grayscale Panic Playdate.
The end of the Switch is near. Nintendo announced a successor to the console just this week, out in late 2025. In the last year of the Switch’s life, the video game giant has largely dotted its Is and crossed its Ts, revisiting long-dormant franchises like Mario & Luigi with BROTHERSHIP, and reinventing classic ones, like The Legend of Zelda with ECHOES OF WISDOM.
Like BREATH OF THE WILD, which opened this console generation, THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: ECHOES OF WISDOM serves as both a metaphor for the Switch and Nintendo’s larger ambitions at the end of the console’s life. It’s both a reminder of how inventive Nintendo (and its numerous subsidiaries and partner studios) can be, and further evidence that the company is past the point of ever truly changing.
If you somehow missed the “radical” new idea at the heart of ECHOES OF WISDOM since it was announced in June 2024 to now, here it is in a nutshell: For the first time in nearly 40 years, you can play as Princess Zelda. Nintendo has included its damsel in distress in various ways throughout the narrative of its games, most recently giving Zelda an important, if still sort of secondary role in TEARS OF THE KINGDOM, and making the princess one of several playable characters in the action game HYRULE WARRIORS.
ECHOES OF WISDOM doesn’t beat around the bush: You are Zelda in this one. The game brings along aesthetic and mechanical differences too, of course. For one, ECHOES OF WISDOM uses the toy-like, almost tilt-shift aesthetic of Nintendo’s LINK’S AWAKENING remake. It’s cutesy, leaning less on the mature, Ghibli-inspired look of recent open world Zelda games and more obviously in a kid-friendly direction. Even if most of the game happens from an isometric perspective, it’s still surprisingly expressive and full of small animations that add charm to otherwise simplistic scenes and characters.
The game is also much more about solving combat and platforming puzzles than anything else. If TEARS OF THE KINGDOM was novel in how it integrated pieces of dungeon-style problem-solving even deeper into the world of the game, ECHOES OF WISDOM carries the ball further by making the various ways you combine Zelda’s Tri Rod powers the main point of the game. You can turn the princess into a ghost version of Link that gives you access to the Master Sword, but the point is moving things around psychically and cloning and reproducing creatures and objects (Moblins, blocks of water, and so many beds).
Just as often as you’re forced to frantically produce something to save your skin, you’ll also have to stop and think. Really, the default posture of the game is pondering. In the most generous light, that reflects a character difference between Zelda and Link. Zelda is a planner. She’s burdened with knowledge. She’s smarter than Link and that makes sense, because she’s often associated with the Triforce of Wisdom. It’s only natural that her game would feel like a puzzle game.
Of course it works the other way too. If there’s an overarching criticism of ECHOES OF WISDOM, it’s that even in making Zelda the protagonist, Nintendo still found a way to make her passive. She has a ninja-esque alter ego in Sheik, yet you still spend most of your time in ECHOES OF WISDOM letting other creatures do work on your behalf. Even when she does hold a sword, she looks like Link rather than something distinctly “Zelda.” The story of the game also features more than a few characters who seem remorseful that someone like Zelda would have to rescue anyone, let alone all of Hyrule. It’s not regressive, but it still feels dated.
There’s no denying the game successfully sets up a new branch of Nintendo’s franchise, though. It’s not hard to imagine multiple sequels starring Zelda solving puzzles. But that tension between the novelty of the ECHOES OF WISDOM and its almost accidental conservatism really reminds me of the Switch. It’s a console that’s left a dent in the universe in all the ways that matter, but now seems at risk of becoming safe. Nintendo doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the Wii U, which was sort of a sequel to the Wii, but also featured some key innovations—a wireless tablet for playing games that’s no doubt an ancestor of the Switch—that ultimately confused fans. The Switch 2 certainly seems like less of an evolution and more just an iteration on the Switch. More powerful, larger, and polished, but still a handheld with detachable controllers.
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