This year we got The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the newest top-down Zelda experience, and it's been a while since we got a brandnew Zelda game in this style. In fact, the last ones were on the Nintendo 3DS, where nine years have passed since the release Tri Force Heroes, and eleven years since A Link Between Worlds – if you're looking for a classic singleplayer Zelda. Curiously, there are many similarities between Echoes of Wisdom and the latter, where this post will go through the most important ones.
The most obvious parallel is, of course, their return to the Hyrule from A Link to the Past. And that's generally a good thing, where these games respect their legacy, instead of coming up with a completely new land that happens to have places called "Kakariko Village", "Lake Hylia", and "Hyrule Castle" on it. A Link Between Worlds stays much closer to A Link to the Past here, only altering smaller parts of the map, while the Hyrule in Echoes of Wisdom is loosely based on the original and expands it around all borders, in an effort to add territories for the different tribes that weren't present in the SNES classic.
Both games also feature some dark and twisted version of Hyrule, much like A Link to the Past did with the Dark World. In case of A Link Between Worlds it's the mirror kingdom Lorule, while in Echoes of Wisdom we have the Still World, made out of fragments from the actual Hyrule. These are quite different from each other in concept, but they have a similar feel to them and both are entered via fissures or rifts visible in the actual Hyrule.
The Still World and Lorule also bring forth another similarity: these Zelda games did not shy away from expanding the lore, especially around the Triforce, which wasn't even mentioned in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. They have introduced a number of things that feel quite important to the universe of the Zelda franchise, while at the same they clearly serve the story of their specific games and aren't likely to return in the future... Whether that's Princess Hilda, Yuga, or the newest villain.
That's a fate shared with the main mechanics of these games, where both the wall merging and the echoes add a completely new dimension to how you're playing a Zelda game, also giving you much more freedom than you had in traditional top-down title. And as good as these gameplay mechanics were, they will probably stay exclusive to the games that invented them.
But maybe Echoes of Wisdom will keep following the example of A Link Between Worlds and spawn a multiplayer-based sequel in the next years. Here you could play as Link and Zelda, where the ability to summon echoes might even return...
~ Two Games Foretold ~
Sadly, another thing Echoes of Wisdom and A Link Between Worlds have in common are their overly extensive marketing campaigns. If you had followed Nintendo's coverage prior to their releases, you may have felt like you had seen it all before as you were finally playing yourself. And that's because you did, where Nintendo doesn't feel the need to hold back for the smaller Zelda games. They didn't spoil the final boss and dungeon, but everything else was fair use.
In case of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom they were a lot more delicate, focusing primarily on the start of these games, until the final trailers also showed almost everything... But at least those only had quick bits and pieces, where the Depths may still have been a surprise for you and various other things. You had to truly analyze the trailers and put a lot together to get an idea of the story...
The pre-release coverage of A Link Between Worlds and Echoes of Wisdom on the other hand was a lot more thorough. "This is Princess Hilda, Zelda's counterpart. And these are the dungeons in Lorule, take a look... Here are the Deku and what they are up to. We have both River and Sea Zora in this game and they are squabbling." It's like they felt the need to show and explain as much as possible, as if they were afraid that no one would buy these "lesser" Zelda games otherwise...
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