Echoes of Awakening

You may already be playing Echoes of Wisdom, because you were lucky to receive the game early or naughty to play some leaked copy, but I'm a good boy who has ordered from Nintendo directly, who (unlike Amazon and co.) make sure that you will get the game on launch day, and not any earlier. That's fine, because until now I was still busy with replaying the Link's Awakening remake anyway, as a preparation.

At first I was actually playing Link's Awakening DX via Nintendo Switch Online, because you can unlock some icons for doing that. But this didn't feel right, especially with Echoes of Wisdom coming up in the style of the amazing remake.

So, I had started this on Saturday and then played a bit each evening, beating the Nightmares today. It was a very casual playthrough, in Normal Mode, just for fun. No real goal, other than freshly re-experiencing the predecessor to tomorrow's Zelda title. Well, it certainly helps to get used to the frame rate issues...

But aside from that, it's my favorite Zelda title and I can't get enough of it. It's just such a good time with absolute fantastic pacing throughout the entire game, and it looks so pretty. There is something to find in every corner, which hopefully is a quality that will carry over into Grezzo's new game.

However, each time I replay this game I forget about at least one of the new Secret Seashells, this time it was the one under the large skull rock on the Ukuku Prairie. But I finally remembered the one from Christine, so that's progress.

There's also a new nitpick to be me made and that's how the get-item animation of more important things, like Pieces of Heart, is lingering a bit too long for my taste. It tells you what you've obtained and then it still shows Link holding the item for about two good seconds or so, while I already want to move on. A small stain on the otherwise great pacing.

I also had some oddities going on during this playthrough, all concerning the mini-games. The Cheep Cheep became available at the Trendy Game before the Angler's Tunnel for some reason, which was weird, because the figurines normally unlock with beating the next dungeon. And I also got the crane stuck with the Piranha Plant, unable to open at the end, which was funny:

For the first time ever, I managed to grab this figure on my first try and then this happens. But you'll actually still get the figurine in such a case, where it's great that the developers have taken care of such an edge case.

Maybe not the biggest oddity, but I manged to create a Chamber Dungeon where you can actually softlock yourself by entering your last key into the wrong door. It was in the "Sheathed Sword" challenge:

There you have the crossroad room with locked doors all around from the Key Cavern. I entered it with one key and if I had used it to go north, I would have been unable to finish the dungeon, because the remaining treasure chests were all behind the other two locked doors. This isn't a big deal, since you can always restart (unlike with normal dungeons, where this shouldn't happen), but it was still interesting to experience this.

Speaking of the Chamber Dungeon, I left out the twelve golden challenges for now. I also haven't purchased all of the Chamber Stones from the Town Tool Shop, but otherwise I have gotten everything, like all Heart Containers, all Secret Seashells, and so on. So, I have done the twelve basic challenges, but I'll most likely leave it at that, because I probably won't keep this save file and just delete it the next time I want to replay this game.

Well, I had a great time and I'm excited to see if Echoes of Wisdom can hold up to this gem. I will go to sleep now and hopefully awaken to the post delivering me my copy of the game. Read you tomorrow!

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