Echoes Of Wisdom is the best Legend Of Zelda game ever

I don’t think it’s going out on too much of a limb to say that The Legend Of Zelda is the most acclaimed video game series in history. Not only has almost every entry been well received but multiple games have been proclaimed the best of all-time. You really can’t do better than that.

I’ve played all the main ones and have enjoyed them all, even Twilight Princess, but I honestly think the new Echoes Of Wisdom may be the best yet. Or at least the one I’ve enjoyed the most. I admit I’m not being objective about this at all, and at the very least recency bias is at play here, but let me tell you my experience and hopefully you’ll see where I’m coming from.

I got the game on launch day and did not expect my wife to take an interest. She’d enjoyed watching Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom but they’re graphically much more involved games and Echoes Of Wisdom is much simpler, with its top-down view and cutsey graphics. If anything, that seemed to interest her more though, especially after she learnt I was play as Zelda herself.

Even more so than Tears Of The Kingdom, we started playing together, in terms of her suggesting solutions and uses for the echoes. This worked great because the game is all about experimentation and seeing if this will ‘work’ and you quickly get so many echoes you’ve got tons of options for every situation.

But then my wife said she wanted to play, which she had never done for previous Zelda games. She’s not a gamer and (like many non-gamers, in my experience) quickly gets frustrated with having to control the camera as well as the character. That’s obviously not an issue in Echoes Of Wisdom and she quickly became better than me, to the point where I was reduced to giving her advice.

I loved this though, as I always feel guilty about hogging the TV or spending so much time playing games. Then the most unlikely thing happened and my in-laws visited, as well as my wife’s sister and her autistic son. To my surprise she suggested putting the game on and all of us – ages ranging from seven to 72 – happily sat there watching the game and shouting out suggestions and advice.

Young Jason then asked to have a go and while he wasn’t interested in trying to solve a dungeon we put him in Hyrule Field and just let him have fun creating monsters and setting them against the enemies. And when I say he had fun, he was playing it for hours, laughing to himself and making up little stories as to what was going on.

I have never seen this before from a single-player game and I found it all strangely heartwarming and affirming (that I wasn’t wasting my time playing games). Then I read about how other readers had had similar experiences and it made me think that Nintendo is absolutely right to not only give Zelda a starring role but to embrace lower budget but more experimental games.

This would never have got made as a big budget 3D game but here it is, a weird experiment that my entire extended family has loved.

My wife and I have beaten the game now and will be tackling hard mode next. I honestly don’t know if I’ve have had more fun with a game in a long time. I’ve certainly never experienced a single-player game in the same way. Maybe, objectively speaking, it isn’t the best Zelda, but it sure feels that way at the moment and it certainly counts as my new favourite.

By reader Korbie