Today Nintendo has launched updates for all Nintendo Switch games that will receive Nintendo Switch 2 upgrade, whether that's for free or as a paid Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, for tomorrow's launch of the new console. Some titles, like Xenoblade Chronicles 3, also got a compatibility fix. Most of these updates only relate to the Nintendo Switch 2, but some games also got some general improvements on top, where you will profit from them on the Nintendo Switch as well – the updates are downloaded in any case.
Tears of the Kingdom, for example, has received the paraglider fabrics for the four new Sage amiibo of Sidon, Riju, Tulin and Yunobo, which will also be released tomorrow. And both it and Breath of the Wild now support Portuguese as a system language option (voices will be in English, however).
But the big winner in all of this is The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, because its version 1.1.0 contains what's by far the most requested feature for the game: the ability to favorite echoes and then display only your favorites. This is the message in the game for the new feature:
This functionality gets unlocked once you've obtained 30 echoes. There is no limit to how many favorites there can be, so you can mark all of them, even though this would defeat the purpose. You can also manage your favorites from within the Notebook, which is a bit more comfortable. And you can sort your favorites in the same ways as all the echoes. There are even new background visuals for the favorites in quick menu, so you can tell its state on first glance:
Overall, this is a fantastic addition, which can make managing your echoes much simpler, instead of only relying on the "most used" sorting. Ideally, there also would have been filters for certain echo types (e.g. fire enemies), but this alone will help quite a lot.
The exact same thing was even part of my update suggestions for the game from last year, where this is would have been nice to have since the beginning. But better late than never... And I'm still planning on replaying the game in Hero Mode, once I have a Nintendo Switch 2, where I will certainly make good use of the favorites going forward.
And it's a shame that they didn't bother with adding this feature to the looooong material list in Tears of the Kingdom, where you had the exact same issue. Or that they didn't bother with improving anything in Breath of the Wild, where it could make good use of all the quality of life changes from Tears of the Kingdom. These are the Zelda games where they are selling these new Nintendo Switch 2 Editions, after all. But maybe this will still happen later on... Tears of the Kingdom will need one more update for the Mineru amiibo anyway.
If the favorite feature in Echoes of Wisdom gets received well, which it should, then Nintendo may even consider doing similar improvements to the other Nintendo Switch Zelda games. And they really should. No game is ever perfect, but they can strive to be.
Could be useful for some sort of challenge run too.
ReplyDeleteMaybe? I mean, with an echo challenge run you usually avoid learning the echoes you don't want/need in the first place. So, unless you're aiming at 100%, while at the same time refrain from using 99% of the echoes, I don't necessarily see any real utility for this use case.
DeleteThat's a great addition. When I was playing Hero Mode last month, one thing that stood out to me was the frustration in trying to find the right echo in the heat of battle. In some cases, opening up the menu might actually be faster than using the D-pad to scroll horizontally.
ReplyDelete