Echoes of Wisdom ~ Still World Presentation

Nintendo has released a new presentation about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom today, called Into the Still World, A Journey Continued. Again, this is an info dump, showing much more of the game than what you may want to see. At least they didn't call it a "trailer" this time.

Well, the "Traversing Hyrule Trailer" has left off with a bit of a cliffhanger about the rifts, so it was only a matter of time that Nintendo went into more details about what to find in them, now called the "Still World". In addition, Zelda can temporarily transform into Link, even though they refer to it as the "Swordfighter Form". We also learn that Dampé returns in a new role, where he creates "Automotons", which are an alternative to the echoes. This includes the mechanical Octorok that we saw in the first trailer... And we can see some first dungeon gameplay, in the Suthorn Ruins.

Anyway, I'm on vacation right now, so I'm not sure I will be able to talk about all the new reveals in a timely manner, but let's see. I didn't even get finish my posts about TUNIC, which will have to wait even longer now... 

And I'm starting to worry that this will become the next A Link Between Worlds, where Nintendo shows everything but the final dungeon before the game's launch. We most likely will get one last of these presentations in a September Nintendo Direct and hopefully that will be it.

They also haven't announced a new amiibo for the game yet, but they are offering bundles with old amiibo (like the one from Link's Awakening) in the European My Nintendo Store, so it doesn't seem like this game will get its own. Though, an amiibo of this version of Zelda would be lovely...

My Journey Through TUNIC

After my review, l wanted to talk a bit about my personal experience with TUNIC. Where did I get stuck? How far did I go with finding out all its secrets? Will I take my rightful place or share my wisdom? This  post will contain heavy spoilers about TUNIC and is targeted at players who have played the game themselves, so you have been warned.

Going into this game I didn't really know much about it. I knew that it was an isometric Zelda-like with more difficult battles, similar to Death's Door. And I have seen parts of the early game from some coverage, giving me a first impression of its cute art style.

Overall, the beginning seems very straightforward: you get a stick and then you go for the sword and the Eastern Bell. So far so good. Page 10 of the manual also gives you a general to-do list of how to proceed afterwards, so that seems simple enough, but this is where I already had faced my first major problem:

How to get to the shield? Well, my actual problem was that I didn't see the key to the old house, because it's beneath a larger enemy that I didn't bother fighting yet. From within the old house you can easily get the shield, but page 10 doesn't mention that. It only mentions the sword and the lantern...

So, I assumed that the shield is found later and going into the house is the primary way of reaching the flooded well. Which it is, but I had found a different path, which let's you skip that, where from that path you can see the shield behind a barred gateway that can only be opened from the other side (which is the primary path, but I didn't get that). You can also spot a purple energy line, where I didn't understand yet what they are for or that they are essentially everywhere. I thought that it was a hint of how to get to the shield – just follow the line(s).

This train of thought led to a long journey through the game's first two dungeons, the Flooded Well and the Dark Tomb, through the West Garden and the Garden Knight, the first bigger boss in the game. All without a shield. However, already starting with the Flooded Well the game was designed with the shield in mind. You have the turrets, for example, or the exploding slimes with spin into you.

Needless to say that this was rather challenging, frustrating even for someone who came from Death's Door, where the game was designed around the dodge roll mechanic and I tried to play in a similar style. In TUNIC dodging is tied to stamina and you have to use it sparingly or get punished. And punished I got often, where I had to learn to use the sprinting instead (which is something I always wanted in Death's Door, ironically).

At least I had gotten the magic rod early or else the West Garden would have been insane without both the shield and a proper means to fight from a distance against the Fairies. And in hindsight I'm quite proud that I did all that without a shield on my first run, it was like a self-imposed challenge.

Afterwards I realized that these purple lines aren't really meant to lead you to the shield and that I must have missed something somewhere, but after defeating the Garden Knight that Envoy enemy didn't seem that threatening any longer and I finally got the key for the house and with it the shield.

Getting the shield made the combat finally click and the game became so much easier afterwards. So, the "self-imposed challenge" created a huge difficulty spike for me in the early game, one that wasn't to be matched until much later.

Well, the Siege Engine boss, which is what I did next, gave me a good challenge as well, until I learned that I just have to stay in its face, which is a good strategy for most of the bosses in this game, really...

The other big point of confusion and also some frustration was the Cathedral, which is probably the most questionable part of the game, because this is after you lost all your stats and then you have to best the most difficult battles in the game yet. Those are similar to the Avarice from Death's Door and that's not exactly easy if you can only get hit like twice...

So, I thought that I was missing something and played a bit too close to the manual. The page for the Cathedral (40) has this list of 13 steps through the dungeon, but each step is written in Trunic, so I didn't really understand what's going on. And it highlighted a treasure in step 8:

My idea was that maybe this treasure chest contains something that helps you with the battle at the end of the Cathedral and that you should get it before. That's not possible, because you need to return here during the day, but the manual explicitly stated that only the dead can get to this place (meaning you need to here by night)... So, I wasn't entirely sure, but this distracted me for quite a bit until I moved on.

Ultimately, the idea of the Cathedral battle is to cheese it bombs and similar items, don't even try to fight fair. They put a shop right before the battle for this very reason. Luckily, I was running back and forth through the Cathedral to find and potentially get that treasure under point 8, so that I had tons of gems and didn't have to worry about running out of bombs and stuff.

The crown with its zip zap ability is a really cool reward, even though it's a bit weird to traverse terrain with it at times, but this completely opens up the finale of the game. But once I had put myself back together with all the stats, I reached another impasse with the Heir, because this boss fight has proven to be too difficult for me.

The dead Librarian says something with the words "HEIR", "DEFEAT", "HOLY CROSS", and there is some mention of the Holy Cross in other places, which I was also still missing, or at least I thought I was. As a Zelda fan, you think of something like the cross from Zelda II - The Adventure of Link, a physical item that improves your powers. And I interpreted the three English words of the Librarian in two different ways:

• You need the Holy Cross to defeat the Heir, or...
• You obtain the Holy Cross after defeating the Heir.
  

Neither of these is correct, but I didn't really know what to do at this point, until I finally started to study the manual with more care and began to understand things. Not the language, but what it meant with "Holy Cross". Realizing that it's the D-pad and you had it all along was probably one of the biggest epiphanies in a video game for me.

And this is when the game starts getting crazy. Once you understand the Holy Cross, you will see its patterns everywhere. New ways open everywhere and everything in the manual is slowly coming together. But I was intrigued... I wanted to find everything, to discover every last secret. So, I took pen and paper in my hand, something I rarely ever do for a game, and started drawing all the patterns...

It was a long way until then, but figuring out the Golden Path and opening the door in the mountains is without a doubt among my proudest video game moments, next to beating the Path of Pain in Hollow Knight. Those are two very different paths, I can tell you that...

But having secrets upon secrets upon secrets in a video game and solving them was absolutely phenomenal. You know this feeling when you solve a puzzle in a Zelda game and you feel smart about it? Well, it's designed to do so, but TUNIC has taken that and amplified it by a thousand. No obvious hints, no sidekick to tell you anything, just lots of clever clues and a good amount of faith in its players. It's incredible.

And receiving the front page of the instruction booklet for your efforts, with the game's logo on it, was such a perfect reward for it. "There, you've mastered the game." I wasn't done yet, however, because I was still missing the back of the manual as well. Technically, you do need it to complete the Golden Path, but you can also make an educated guess there, which is what I did... So, I still had to look for the rest of the fairy souls.

The alternative ending, where you share you wisdom with the Heir, is equally moving and adorable. I absolutely loved it. Still, I also wanted to defeat the Heir normally for the bad ending, but that still wasn't in the cards for me. I can beat the first phase just fine, but the second phase gave me too much trouble.

But just like the Cathedral battle, there is some cheese for tha, where the fight becomes braindead easy with enough decoys. The Heir goes after them every single time and you can just mindlessly attack without having to worry... Probably the most anticlimactic way of finishing a game, but at least I've done it...

However, there was still more to uncover with the twelve Secret Treasures. They are purely optional in the game and don't give you any sort of advantage, but on Steam there is even an achievement for every one of them, so this was incentive enough to go after them. And even without, I was hooked and wanted more...

This is where I reached my limits, however. I was able to find nine of the treasures on my own, but for the last three I had to swallow my pride and get help from the internet. The first one was the spinning cube... Because of the distorted music I thought that this puzzle had to do something with sound, but that wasn't the case. You just have to follow the directions it spins, plain and simple.

One of the Secret Treasures is tied to a sound puzzle, however, where you have to keep listening to a wind chime and try to hear whether a note is lower a higher than before. That's freaking insane, but here I used a good tip that you can let the game display the music notes in the accessibility options. It's called "audio puzzle assistance" and I think this is only ever really used for this particular puzzle. But this made it easy enough to discover the Holy Cross path myself, after all.

Finally, there was one last chest, probably the most ridiculous, the one at the shore. For each Secret Treasure you can find a hint in the instruction booklet, where the last memo page tells you the numbers to understand what's even a hint to begin with. In this case it's "51 + 1", two pages marked with a star. And the idea with the water was really neat, but it only starts there... You get a secret message written in Trunic, and the only way to solve this puzzle is to actually learn the language after all. Ugh.

This opens a whole other can of worms for what's essentially one last treasure chest. I had achieved everything else, so it really now came to learning the language, which wasn't necessary until now... But I didn't want to give up so easily and I thought that I could get some clues, where the TUNIC Reddit is filled with topics about giving you hints how to start. I can be smart if I need to be, but I'm not a genius and failed to see the phonetic nature of the language.

But once I understood this, deciphering became a lot of fun, almost like another game within the game. The process took hours, but I was hooked and willing to figure out this one last puzzle... Only to look up the solution on the internet after all.

Problem was that what I had translated didn't really make much sense and I also had some mistakes in there, so I was as smart as I was before all that trouble. (I thought that I had to collect 11 feathers or something.) The accurately translated message is an English pun, a play on words going down, left, right... So, that was needlessly cryptic and a bit of a bummer there at the end.

I also didn't bother with the puzzle through the treasure chamber portal and just looked this up, where this doesn't unlock anything in the game and seems like it was meant to be more of a community effort.

Still, despite this one treasure, I had a lot of fun solving all the riddles and secrets of TUNIC. Coming from the Zelda series, this was really refreshing, because Nintendo would never dare to make a game like this these days, where you have to think completely out of the box and you may even have to take a pen in your hand to get a better understanding of how the world works.

However, after beating the game once, TUNIC has lost a lot of its magic. It's just not an experience that you can replicate again... I've started playing the New Game+, but when you know about all the secrets and already have all the items, it's really just not that good anymore. And the combat isn't all too great to give me the same replay value as Death's Door.

Maybe I'll go for the "Bring it to the wrong fight" achievement instead, where you have to find the gun before the sword. That will at least add another meaningful challenge, testing your knowledge of the game.

TUNIC — Secret Legend

As a Zelda fan, you've probably heard about TUNIC by now, maybe you've already played it. It's an indie Action Adventure, which is heavily inspired by classic Zelda games and pays tribute to video game manuals of old, which were full of beautiful art and offered valuable pieces of information, just like the one for The Legend of Zelda. But it also mixes in some Souls-like elements to make the combat more challenging.

This game came out in 2022, which was perfect timing due to the delay of Tears of the Kingdom, giving Zelda fans something fresh to play while they had to wait a little longer for the next big title, unless you were very busy with Elden Ring in that year anyway. If you have the Microsoft Game Pass, then you will find the game included in that. And for everyone else still in need, it was on sale for both the Nintendo eShop and Steam a couple of months ago... (Which is were I finally went for it.)

If you ever hated it when certain Zelda games have spelled things out for you, then TUNIC could be your thing, because it literally does the opposite. You're dropped right into the world, not knowing anything about what's going on, and everything is written in a custom-made language, which can't be easily deciphered and is not necessarily meant to be, unless you want to find every last secret on your own. You will get bits and pieces of English, just enough to give you some direction, but not enough to understand the true meaning.

You will have to put this together yourself, where scattered through the world you can find pages of the game's manual. In there you will get many illustrations, some English, some hand-written notes, and other useful things, where some pages even act as your map. But since most of it is still written in the cryptic language and you are also missing pages, you won't be able to understand everything right away. And that's part of the  journey.

Like in most Zelda or Metroid games, there is classic progression based on items. Early on you won't be able to get past by bushes, for example, and you first will need to find a sword for that. That's as classic as it gets. But there is also progression based on knowledge, which means that you won't understand everything right away, like what certain objects in the game world are for. Somewhere down the road, you might get an aha moment by studying the manual pages, which then opens new doors for you – doors that were closed only in your mind. These discoveries are some of the most satisfying moments in the game, and that's the true magic of TUNIC.

This principle is also making the most out of the silent protagonist, a little fox doing a Link cosplay. You don't even know what your task or your role in all of this is. That's something you will have to find out on your way, gradually obtaining more and more context, which may lead to some surprises. And that's something everyone should experience on their own, just like the little fox.

You may get some escape room vibes from all this, where you're given clues and putting it all together, as you collect the different manual pages. It's quite unique for a video game and becomes refreshingly meta. Once you learn more and more, will start seeing hints everywhere in the world, which will lead to even more discoveries. The rabbit hole goes very deep in this one.

In this sense you also have to praise the game's soundtrack, which is psychedelic. The music may not be as memorable overall, save for the beautiful overworld theme, but a lot of effort and thought went into the sound design of TUNIC. This goes as far as that you can run the game's audio through a spectrometer to reveal secrets that are hidden in the spectrograms, like the game's runes. For example, in the shop you will get runes that translate to "buy" or "no". So, not only did they create a whole written language for the game, they made sounds based on it as well.

Other than lots and lots of secrets, the world of TUNIC is also filled with angles for sequence breaking and doing things in any order. If you play it for the first time, it will unfold quite linearly, however. This might be to your liking, because you're getting a helpful sense of direction, but you will get to see the possibilities once you progress, which then may encourage you to experiment in future runs.

The world does have dungeons and you also have some key items to collect to make progress in the story, but it's not necessarily structured like your traditional Zelda game. Some dungeons only act as a passage, while some of the bosses are out in the overworld. So, the world design is technically closer to a Metroid game than a Zelda game.

You will even find checkpoints, where you will respawn upon death. You will then leave an echo behind together with some gems, the game's currency, but only a few and not your total amount, unlike Hollow Knight for example. So, you don't really have to go for it, where picking your echo up mainly serves as a help, because doing so will create a small shockwave stunning nearby enemies.

The checkpoints will also refill all of your potions and meters: health, stamina and magic. They are represented in the colors red, green and blue, which is common theme throughout the game. Stamina is the only of these bars that also refills automatically, and is used for both blocking and rolling. Health can be regained via the potions, which are collected in a similar fashion to the Pieces of Hearts and Heart Containers from the Zelda series. They also have to be used in real time, so healing can be interrupted by enemies. Finally, magic is used for certain items, like the Wand (a fire rod), and can be refilled either from enemy drops or blue fruits.

The fruits are part of the game's various depletable items, which also include different types of bombs. Those are not saved on checkpoints, meaning that they are gone once you use them, even if you die, and then you need to buy (or find) new ones. This is one of the few design flaws in TUNIC, because it can lead to unwanted grinding in case you need some of these items for tougher battles. And some of the stronger ones can't even be re-purchased, so they will be gone for good and can effectively be wasted.

There is a system in the game where you get some free extra bombs, which are then replenished with the checkpoints. And it might have been better if most of the game's items worked like that...

Like with using potions, the game will keep running when you go into your inventory, meaning that you can't easily swap items in the middle of a battle and therefore have to be quite conscious about what you put on your buttons (where you can freely use X, Y, and B).

The same goes for the cards. These essentially work like the Charms from Hollow Knight, so you can equip a limited number of them for different buffs and effects. However, the game doesn't really tell you about those, and only a few are revealed by the manual. And it's not always obvious what the cards do on first glance, some even come with negative effects and you have to be careful... So, collecting them doesn't feel all too satisfying and useful at first.

As for your stats, you have three different bars with your total amount of HP, SP and MP, but also three other attributes: attack, defense, and the potency of your potions. They can be improved in the game via some other collectibles, but you will also need a lot of gems, so there is always a good reason to keep fighting enemies.

However, there is one point in the game which will take away all these stats and then make you go fight the most difficult enemy gauntlets yet, which feels totally unfair. Here you will have to make the cheese and eat it, too, but this can lead to a situation where you're stuck with grinding the same things before the fight, because you may need them.

And your quest to regain all your stats drags on quite a bit afterwards... Overcoming all this will make you feel like a true hero, but it's also the game's low point for sure and might be quite demotivating for some people.

The combat can also be a bit clunky. It lacks impact, the dodge roll is a bit slow, and the timing for the parrying is also hard to master, but luckily you don't really need the latter at any point in the game, though it can be advantageous. It's not that fighting in TUNIC is terrible – it's certainly not worse than your usual top-down Zelda game and does offer some good challenge. But it's also not in the same league as Hollow Knight or Death's Door, where it's a big part of what makes playing these Action Adventures so insanely satisfying and addicting. TUNIC encourages cheesing more than anything else, meaning that it's often not about skill, but about being clever. And that can make it feel a bit cheap.

You will get some spectacular boss fights nevertheless, often well staged. The Siege Engine, for example, which is a gigantic war machine, will leave a permanent impression. And yes, similar to Breath of the Wild, technology does play an important role in this fantasy world, though it is seamlessly integrated and therefore never feels out of place.

Doing absolutely everything in TUNIC will take quite some dedication and roughly 30 hours, maybe less if you're super smart or willing to look up solutions on the internet. But if you're simply gunning for the final boss, then it will take less than half of that. It's a rather short game overall, where most of the play time will come from figuring out all of its secrets. Which are a lot.

If you're still looking for more, there is also a New Game+, where you keep all your stats and even all of your items, with a few key exceptions. This completely opens the game up, where you can do almost everything in any order. Well, technically you could before, but it's much easier in this mode. The battles are also easier for the most part, but you will occasionally find stronger foes to make things more interesting than before.

Otherwise there isn't really much to it, however. Once you've beaten and potentially even completed TUNIC, all the mystery will be gone and with that a lot of the game's appeal. This is one of those games where you wish that you could delete your memories about it and experience it for the first time again.

Conclusion

With TUNIC you will get a love letter to video games of old, where looking at a beautiful manual was part of the experience and where you never really knew what secrets are hidden within the games that you have. If you go in blind, then this will be a game that can surprise you in many ways. It does have some rough edges, though, where the combat could be more fun and its item system could be simplified a bit, but overall this game can be recommended to any Zelda fan out there.

PS: I will also talk about my personal journey through the game and my struggles in a separate post.

Hyrule Blog: Updated Game Buttons

Echoes of Wisdom is just around the corner and thus this website needed a nice blog button as a shortcut to all posts about the game. However, since this caused a line break, I've also added buttons for Link's Crossbow Training and Cadence of Hyrule to even things out... and to show the spin-offs some more love (except for the Tingle games, for now).

In addition, the buttons for Four Swords and Twilight Princess got new backgrounds to add more visual variety, because too many buttons simply used the one of the blog. Now it's down to four. With Four Swords recently in the news, it's also nice to look at something fresher here.

Finally, there are more buttons for some indie Action Adventures in the spirit of Zelda and Metroid, where we're looking at Hollow Knight and Death's Door, which both have been featured on this blog in the recent years and really deserve the spotlight. But if you look closely, I've already prepared a button for another one... So, that's going to be a topic soon.

Zeldathon 1986

... starts in 24 hours. The charity marathon will last for six days and collect money for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. I usually tune in and also leave a couple donations, because the Zeldathon is always a good time, but I rarely ever promote this on my blog, which needs to change. And as someone born in 1986, the year that made legends, I'm really digging the classic The Legend of Zelda retro theme here. The logo and background are absolutely gorgeous, so I wanted to share this in any case.

You can find all information about this on Zeldathon.com, check it out. They also have some crazy cool stuff in their schedule, like TUNIC, Zelda: Tilt 'n' Rumble or Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore. The latter is this CD-i Zelda inspired game made by the guy who remastered Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon for the PC. I've been meaning to check those out for quite a while now, if only I had more time...

Got the Tears of the Kingdom Official Soundtrack

This beauty has arrived fresh from Japan this Friday. Like the Skyward Sword Soundtrack from three years ago, I ordered this one via play-asia and everything went well, so I can only recommend this shop (I'm not affiliated in any way). It's the Limited Edition, which comes in a nice box and some extras.

 

There is the soundtrack itself, spread across a total of nine discs, a booklet, and a small Master Sword statue. The inside of the disc box shows the mural in the background and the discs have the Secret Stone runes on them, which is pretty nice.

And here's the Master Sword statue, which is secretly a USB drive, which I find funny. It's so cool to remove this from its socket. Though, I got excited there for a minute, because I thought that it might hold the entire soundtrack, but it's only a Sound Selection of 15 tracks. They are flac files (lossless quality), however, with one of them taking a whopping 475MB. So, not exactly something that you want to put on your MP3 player, but nice to have, especially since you get to hear more instrumental details that I never noticed before.

The 15 tracks include all the major boss battle themes, the main theme, and the trailer musics, where the last one is of course the highlight. You can find a complete tracklist of the entire soundtrack and the sound selection on play-asia.

But I'm happy with this purchase, it's another beautiful addition to my Tears of the Kingdom collection. It's a shame that these soundtracks are never coming to the west, because I would love to be able to read the booklet (and the tracklist inside) without learning Japanese first.

Animal Crossing x Sea Life @ Berlin

Nintendo has currently a cooperation with SEA LIFE going, where they are doing a crossover with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. One of the locations is Berlin, from July 18th to September 8th, and since there is rarely anything Nintendo-related happening where I live, we decided to go there for a weekend trip

This crossover is generally a nice idea, since you have such aquariums in the game's museum. And there is of course some overlap of the fish that you have in the game and at SEA LIFE, so that's interesting to experience. But it was overall quite underwhelming, both the aquarium attraction and the Animal Crossing: New Horizons event, which may be due to the location.

The SEA LIFE in Berlin doesn't have all to much going for it. At the end there is a tunnel that leads through a tank with stingrays and other fish inside, which is very impressive, but otherwise it couldn't really compete with the aquariums that I saw in certain zoos, especially since everything was quite small.

And as for the Animal Crossing crossover, it wasn't bad, but it was lacking effort. You have a stamp rally as part of the event, which is also something that you do in the game's museum, so that was clever. During the tour you'll find these stamp stations in the form of posters on the wall with certain villagers. These were usually clustered with two at once, so you didn't really have to look for them. As a nitpick I have to mention that some of the stamps weren't properly aligned with what was shown on top, which was annoying if you wanted them to be correctly rotated.

Each station also had a poster with Blathers, who gives some information about one of the fishes or sea creatures that you can find both in the game and in SEA LIFE, where they give you a quiz sheet for that. You had to fill out a seven letter word and each poster came with a letter, but we knew the solution after the first one already. (It started with "S", can you guess it?)

And then there were some questions about the stuff that Blathers tells you, which were easy to answer... except for the first one. There they wanted to know how heavy carps can get, but we had to google this information to find out, because it wasn't stated anywhere. Other than that, it was clearly made for the entertainment of small children, but that's okay. It also wasn't required to answer any of the questions, that was just for your own education.

Then you could find Gulliver in one location, floating on a boat, while some guy or gal had to pose in an Isabelle costume, where it was hilarious how much the people loved this. See the first photo.

If you got all stamps and the easy-to-guess secret word, you could score some small merchandise at the end. You get a post card of the event and then you could pick from four different items. They had a sticker sheet, a cleaning cloth, some cheap luggage bag, or a SEA LIFE wristband for those who don't care about Animal Crossing. Well, you can see what we've picked above.

The biggest disappointment then was the shop. We saw that the same event in Paris had this big booth at the end with all sorts of Animal Crossing merchandise, where I was prepared to bleed some money here. But all they had in Berlin were some plush toys and LEGO sets... Eh.

So, overall I wouldn't recommend this event, at least not for Berlin. And this is ignoring all the controversy around SEA LIFE and most zoos, where you might want to boycott them in general and for good reasons. And to be honest, I don't think I would have ever gone there without the Animal Crossing: New Horizons stuff, so this little event was a big incentive for us. Can't say it was worth the trip, but we were also meeting with an old friend of mine afterwards, so we had a great day nevertheless.

Echoes of Wisdom ~ Japanese Website Update

Today Nintendo of Japan has launched the World and Wisdom sections on their website for Echoes of Wisdom, which shows us even more of the game. There's quite a lot, and I'm getting worried that this will become the next A Link Between Worlds, where Nintendo had shown everything but the final dungeon before the game launched. The amount of coverage was ridiculous and hopefully all of this is only scratching on the surface right now.

Anyway, with this blog I'm in no position to avert my eyes, so let's go through some of the interesting facts and details that this update brings. First, we learn the names of some of the side characters at Hyrule Castle (thanks to @OatmealDome for the translations):

• Minister Sadari
• General Ugi
• Ruberi
  

The minister and general are the two characters who come to aid when the King of Hyrule gets swallowed by a rift. The king is only named that for now, King of Hyrule, but I'm still hoping for something lengthy and pompous here. Sadari might be a woman, but I'm not sure. And Ruberi is Impa's older brother, who is researching the rifts, which feels a bit similar to Josha and Robbie researching the Depths. Sheikah scientists and all.

Also, there are a couple new echoes and enemies that weren't featured in any footage yet (at least not that I recall):

• A monster in a cyclone, which can be used similar to the Whirlwind item from Spirit Tracks
• A blue Slug, maybe a Water Slug
• An electric variant of the Spark
  
• A Bari (with artwork, they were briefly seen in the first trailer)
  
• A Beamos
• A Wolfos (returning for the first time since Majora's Mask)
  
• A teddy
  

The website is really stressing the fact that there are multiple solutions for every problem, where they showcase an obstacle or a combat situation with two different echoes. For example, we can see the Bombfish and the new whirlwind enemy in action, where both are used to fight the same enemies – a swarm of Beetles – in different ways.

Speaking of, I find it fascinating that the Beetles are back, because they were somewhat of an oddity in Link's Awakening, only found coming out of a certain hole south of Kanalet Castle. I wonder if those termite mounds (the weird rocks with a hole on top seen near the Beetles) can be used in a similar way, meaning that they keep spawning the Beetles.

Otherwise, the whole Zora quest definitely has a musical theme going on. You could already spot instruments all over the River Zora Village, but now we have screenshots of the River Zora King blowing into a horn and the Sea Zora Queen playing a harp. They should form a band and call themselves the Indigo-Gos. Oh, and there is a cool-looking ship found in the ocean section, where you can climb on board.

Echoes of Wisdom ~ Smoothies

You want to have potions in your Zelda game, but make them cuter? Well, turn them into smoothies! Now, this is the equivalent to the food items from Breath of the Wild, with a couple of differences. Instead of making them yourself in a cooking pot, you will have to go to a Smoothie Shop, run by a Business Scrub. He will then let you combine two materials that you've gathered into a smoothie.

One of the examples given by the Traversing Hyrule Trailer is a Mixed Milky Smoothie for 10 Rupees, made from an Electro Apple and Fresh Milk. There is the number 8 next to it, where there might be a recipe book for smoothies and this is it's entry number.

The Electro Apple gives you resistance to electricity, while the Fresh Milk boost the healing effect, meaning that it grants you more hearts. Only the latter seems to apply here with the Mixed Milk Smoothie. It doesn't show any icon for electricity or whatever, only the 13 hearts.

They then proceed to combine an Electro Apple with a Floral Nectar, where that one is stated to boost the effect of other ingredients. And this turns into a "Mixed Apple Smoothie". Whether any of this actually gives you the electricity resistance, we don't know yet... But this already creates the worry that the system will be as higgledy-piggledy as the recipes in Tears of the Kingdom. At least you can always only combine two ingredients with each other, so this should make figuring out all recipes much simpler.

Ingredients also don't seem to be as easy to come by this time. There are no visible fruits in the environments and monsters don't seem to drop any materials. Shops do sell them and maybe this is your main way of acquiring them. But they could also be found in treasure chests or won in mini-games.

The biggest concern is, however, that this could break the game once more, because the food system in Breath of the Wild is wildly overpowered. You can eat to heal at any time and you can carry way too much food around with you. If used right, it will remove any challenge from the game. And that's something that they should get away from, instead of doing it again in a different form.

It's actually one of the few things that Skyward Sword did better with its Adventure Pouch. You had limited space and had to chose what to bring with you, which included potions. It was too restrictive and threw too many things into one pot, but at least you couldn't just mindlessly overheal yourself countless times. And you had to drink your potions in real time, while dodging enemies.

Echoes of Wisdom ~ Horses

One of the topics of the Traversing Hyrule Trailer was... well, traversal. And here they announced that the game will feature horses. Similar to the Gerudo, this is actually not the first time that we have horses in a top-down Zelda game, because you were able to ride on one (or four) in Four Swords Adventures. But there it was more of a temporary power-up, which was only featured in a single stage and one of the Tingle Tower challenges. So, it's easy to forget.

In Echoes of Wisdom, however, they will be one of your main methods of getting around quickly, the other being the plentiful Travel Waypoints. You will also be able to use Reverse Bond on certain echoes for very quick movements, e.g. with a Blade Trap, but you can jump with horses and steer them. So, hopefully this won't turn into the same scenario as in Tears of the Kingdom, where horses become completely pointless the second you obtain Autobuild.

At least, you can now summon from anywhere via a carrot echo, so this is a huge improvement already. It may even be the second-most convenient way of summoning your horse in the series. The first is still the Ancient Saddle in Breath of the Wild, and it will be hard to top that one, but with the carrot echoes you won't use them accidentally, which is something that can happen with the Ancient Saddle down on the D-pad.

Otherwise, the carrots are certainly faster to use than to play Epona's Song in the N64 games. And the Horse Call in Twilight Princess is obtained too late in the game to be any useful, though once you have it, it's also quite convenient.

Then there is also the question of where you can summon it, because that's often quite limited. But on the Japanese website you can find a video clip, where Zelda is riding her horse on the top of a high cliff and even through the Gerudo Desert, where the latter was not possible in Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. You can also see her jumping over a river mouth on a beach, so they gave this a lot of thought. Nevertheless, there will still be areas where you won't be able to use it, like the ocean. And most likely also Eldin Volcano and the snowy Death Mountain. But let's see...

Your horse can also have different colors. The default one seems to be a brown horse with a dark mane. But you can also have a white horse with a blonde mane, looking similar to the white horse from Breath of the Wild. And the additional footage mentioned above has a gray horse in it.

The question here is whether these are all different horses or all the same one, but customized. Both is possible. I'm personally hoping that they will keep things simple, so I don't necessarily want to tame wild horses, where they all have different stats at random. Maybe the Lon Lon Ranch will offer you a selection and you can pick your favorite.

Echoes of Wisdom ~ The Power to Bind

Let's finally talk about the most important reveal from the latest trailer. In addition to creating echoes of all sorts of objects and enemies, Tri will let you use "Bind" on them, even on objects that normally can't be turned into echoes, like some gigantic boulder.

Visually, this looks very similar to the Ultrahand from Tears of the Kingdom and it partially even works like it, in the sense that this lets you move things around, but unlike with Ultrahand you can't do so freely. Whatever is bound to you will simply follow your movements, even when you jump. So, this is actually an evolution of the Dominion Rod from Twilight Princess, where this isn't limited to certain statues any longer.

Apparently, you will learn this ability early in the game, but not right at the start. Zelda has already five hearts in the showcased sequence, where she seems to be back in the dungeon where Link fought Ganon, which might be the first dungeon in the game.

In any case, Bind feels like the missing puzzle piece after the introduction to the concept of echoes. Back in June, the main concern was that the echoes will make things too passive. Instead of fighting enemies with a sword yourself, you will summon a Moblin who fights them with a sword for you, while you just watch and dodge. Bind gives Princess Zelda a lot more agency, where she can now actively use certain summons as a weapon.

You can even move enemies around with Bind, which looks overpowered first. But if you have played the Trine series, where you can do something similar with the wizard, then you will know that this won't necessarily help you with groups of enemies. You probably will get interrupted whenever something hits you, so you still have to be careful. And there will be environments, especially inside dungeons, where you simply won't have anything to discard enemies into.

In the footage, Zelda creates a hole with a mole and then drops a Moblin inside it, which is very clever, but of course you won't always have earth or sand below your feet. Some dungeons in the Link's Awakening remake had this, however, like the Tail Cave or the Catfish's Maw, where finally this would have some utility.

When using Bind on things that normally move on their own, you can even flip the bond and make you follow them. As an example, they let Zelda climb some trees and hills with a Skulltula. Or they let her fly around with a bird.

Of course, this makes things passive yet again, because you're at the mercy of whatever you're bound to. In case of the Skulltula echo, it seems to automatically climb anything that you put it against. But with the bird it looked like you were just going in circles, which isn't exactly helpful. You're better off with summoning your own bird echo and then picking it up, which is something that you also can do. So, it will be quite situational and heavily depend on the echoes / entities.

Interestingly, the icon for Bind is Tri itself, Zelda's new fairy companion. This goes on the X button, while your echoes are summoned with Y. (B is probably used for jumping.) You can even see how Tri moves towards the objects and enemies whenever you use Bind on them, and goes back to Zelda when you use Reverse Bond. The echoes on the other hand are purely coming from the Tri Rod. Tri's tail is an indicator of how much you can summon, but it's the rod that does the summoning. So, Bind is actually the main ability of Tri.

And this makes me wonder: what else will be there and what form does it take? It doesn't seem like this game will have traditional items, like a Hookshot. Echoes are essentially your items and even add a sense of progression, because you won't have all echoes from the start. But the inventory doesn't seem to have a page where you swap whatever you have on the X button, so this is probably also done with the D-pad, much like in Breath of the Wild.

If Tri was the only thing that ever goes on X, then they probably wouldn't show the button on the HUD. And this is curious, because Tri seems to be very important to this game, so whatever you can place on X otherwise should be equally important, because it's replacing your sidekick. The best answer to this is that there will be more fairies like Tri, who all have their own abilities. This would be similar to the three Spirits from Phantom Hourglass – Ciela, Leaf, and Neri –, who all came with different buffs, only that this time these fairies would be your main items and you constantly switch between them.

If that's true, then this could lead to having some proper progression in the game. You start with the Tri Rod and creating echoes. Then you will learn Bind from Tri early on. And then you may have to free other fairies, Tri's siblings or whatever, where each of them will grant you a new power. Ideally, these powers will let you utilize the echoes in other ways.

One idea would be "Lift", where it shoots things upwards, similar to the Tornado Rod from A Link Between Worlds, only that this can be used on anything. But you could summon a bed, step on it, and then use the Lift power to turn it into an elevator. You could potentially stun enemies by throwing them up into the air. And the reverse of this ability could make things flip around, so it would work like the Cane of Pacci from The Minish Cap. Like Bind, it's a simple mechanic that would bring lots of utility thanks the echo system.

Ideally, the existence of such abilities is something that Nintendo will let us discover ourselves, because the combination of echoes and Bind is already promising enough to sell the game. Lots of potential there.

Echoes of Wisdom ~ Wanted Princess

In the new trailer you can see wanted posters of Princess Zelda in various places, like on the walls of Hyrule Castle Town (see above in the top left corner). It's also featured in the game's key art. This confirms what we already have been speculating about back in June, where you could see Princess Zelda stuck in a cell below Hyrule Castle and has to escape from there. All of this is a throwback to A Link to the Past, where Link got framed for kidnapping Princess Zelda and there were signs with a sketch of him in Kakariko.

The Japanese website also shows some stealth gameplay in Hyrule Castle, where you have to get past by the Hylian guards, similar to Ocarina of Time or The Minish Cap, only that this takes place in the basement. And the website also might give us an idea how Zelda got into this situation...

There is some footage of the King of Hyrule, who has a new design. He looks a bit similar to King Rhoam with the beard and hair, but only a bit, and has a completely new outfit. Anyway, in this scene a rift appears right below them. He shoves Zelda to safety, but gets swallowed by it, much like Link was. The guard and the minister come to his aid, where they then share the same fate and turn to stone in the process, so only Zelda manages to escape here.

It's easy to see why someone would think that she is the cause of these rifts. She was found at the first one and now she is right there when her father gets taken by one. So, there doesn't necessarily need to be an evil person framing her, like Agahnim did with Link in A Link to the Past. But there still might be...

The next trailer will potentially show us more about the rifts, since the current one kind of ended on a cliffhanger there. Maybe they will also talk about this part of the story a bit more. Or maybe this will be something that they will leave for the players to find out.

Echoes of Wisdom ~ Main Artwork Background

This graphic is something that you can find on the Japanese website and it's quite interesting. It's used for the cover art of the game, but it actually comes without Zelda, Link and Ganon (they get inserted via additional PNG files). And this version is extended quite a bit, revealing additional details that we haven't seen before.

There is a new character in the top left corner, who is paragliding. Given that he is featured so prominently, he might have a slightly more important role.

And you can spot Zelda's wanted poster on the wall to the right. It was also already visible multiple times in the latest trailer, but here you can see it in great detail. That gigantic nose is hilarious, whoever drew this really doesn't like Princess Zelda. It's also confirming that Zelda is indeed framed as a criminal for some reason, but we'll get to that in another post.

Via NintendoLife

Echoes of Wisdom ~ Accessories & Clothing

A Link Between Worlds might mark the last Zelda game where you only get a blue and red tunic as simple upgrades to your clothing. Tri Force Heroes embraced its different outfits and Breath of the Wild then introduced a sophisticated armor system, where Echoes of Wisdom seems to land somewhere in the middle of this.

Well, it would have been disappointing if Princess Zelda didn't get more fashionable, but she does and the Traversing Hyrule Trailer gives us a first look at what you can expect here. You will get whole outfits again, like in Tri Force Heroes, but they've added accessories on top of that for smaller buffs.

These accessories seem very similar to the Magic Rings from Oracle of Ages & Seasons, only that they are not limited to rings. But they do have the same type of buffs. For example, the Zora's Flippers, which aren't required for swimming any longer, work the same as the Swimmer's Ring: they increase your swim speed. And here's a list of what was shown in the trailer:

• Zora's Flippers: Swim Speed Up
• Zora Scale: Dive Time Up
• Frog Ring: Jump Height Up
• Heart Pin: Heart Appearance Up
  

There is also a hibiscus with a similar icon to the Heart Appearance Up, but with a butterfly instead of a heart, which probably means that certain insects may appear more often.

And it really seems like you will be able to jump with the press of a button (and not automatically), most likely the B-button, where the Frog Ring increases that height, so maybe you will be able to jump up a full block with this.

If you've followed this blog for a while, then you will know that I love these type of items, whether it's the Magic Rings from Oracle of Ages & Seasons, or the Charms in Hollow Knight. It's a fantastic collectible, because each piece gives you something unique, and it's fun to make good use of the different perks.

Interestingly, there is a list of applied accessories on the right side of the menu. This looks rather spacious, which may indicate that later on you will be able to equip multiple accessories at once. Unlike the outfits, the accessories aren't actually visible on Zelda, however.

The outfits work similar to the ones from Tri Force Heroes, which means that they will change your whole appearance. With a top-down game you don't really need anything more filigreed anyway. And the system in Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom was somewhat convoluted, because the set bonuses often go against the flexibility of being able to freely combine different headpieces, tops and trousers. So, having whole outfits with the accessories sprinkled on top feels like a good compromise. You get the sets and you get some other useful bonus(es) on top.

Whether the outfits also come with special abilities and perks remains to be seen, but it's thinkable that the Gerudo outfit allows you to bear the heat of the desert, for example. They may just be for the looks, since they don't have any icons next to them in the menu, but that would be unusual for a Zelda game. The only game where you've swapped clothes purely for the looks was in Spirit Tracks with the Engineer's Clothes, but that's about it, unless you also count the Nintendo Switch Shirt in Breath of the Wild.

Anyway, if the outfits also have some functionality, then there should be a clear distinction: accessories give you buffs, meaning they enhance or improve what's already there, while outfits give you new abilities that you wouldn't have otherwise, e.g. making you fireproof. If it were like that, then this could become the best armor / outfit system in the series.