ZELDA-HORSE

Exploring Hyrule and Abilities in Zelda Echoes of Wisdom

Today Nintendo released some new offical information related to Zelda Echoes of Wisdom. The new trailer details some of the place we’ll visit, the people we’ll meet, plus how to travel across Hyrule as well as some exciting new abilities for Zelda on her adventures throughout Hyrule. Today I’m going to recap all the latest news and information from Zelda Echoes of Wisdom.

Without any delay, let’s dive into the information.

Places

First of all Nintendo detailed some of the locations we’re going to visit in this version of Hyrule. We have a Central Plateau with out Castle Town. Then we make our way to Gerudo Desert where we have dunes, plus variable weather with sandstorms, plus an oasis to cool down. It’s a nice addition for weather effects to be added, although it wasn’t clear if this was isolated to just the Gerudo Desert, or this is expanded in other areas.

We also have Jabul Waters which is the home of the Sea and River Zora people. We saw a snippet in the first trailer for Echoes of Wisdom, which we thought there may have been an arguement going on between the Zora races, and that’s confirmed here in the latest trailer. These Zora are clearly having an arguement, but Nintendo didn’t go into detail as to why they were fighting.

Next we have Eldin Volcano. Kakariko Village is at the bottom of the mountain, plus we have the Goron people living here too. Finally we have the Faron Wetlands, here we meet the Deku Scrubs. Later we’ll meet the Deku Tree himself, although Nintendo didn’t provide anymore details about the Deku Tree in this trailer.

Sidequests

Echoes of Wisdom will see the addition of an Adventure Log, which is going to help us keep track of side quests in the game. There’s plenty of people to meet, and treasure to find related to side quests, and this is going to be an importart part of exploring Hyrule, and ultimately saving the day. The Adventure Log is similar to what we see in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, so this is going to be a nice additon to the top-down Zelda style games, and it’s good to see some positive influences coming from the recent Nintendo Switch era games.

Traveling around Hyrule

We have a couple of options when it comes to travel. There are various waypoints around Hyrule that we can activate, then they act as fast-travel points. Plus Zelda has a horse, which makes getting around Hyrule on foot much quciker and easier. Zelda can learn a carrot echo to summon her horse from any location. It looks like Zelda has multiple horses, rather than a single horse like Epona, given the second horse has a different colour compared to the first. We could see horses roaming about Hyrule, but maybe they can only be tempted by carrots, hence needing to learn the carrot echo, or maybe you can buy them from shops.

Smoothies

Deku Scrubs are driving the economy of Hyrule through a new smoothie mechanic. Business Scrubs sell various smoothies, and Zelda can modify the smoothies to enhance abilities. Smoothies looks to be a similar, yet simpler version of cooking found in the recent Legend of Zelda games. Deku Scrubs will allow Zelda to blend ingrendients you’lve collected for helpful boosts including resistance to elemental effects and recharging health.

Outfits

Players can enhance Zelda’s abilities through different outfits, plus they obviously provide different looks for Zelda on her adventures. Link’s had different outfits in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. It continues the theme of bringing in inspiration from the open-world Zelda games into the top-down style adventures.

Bind

Bind is a new ability for Princess Zelda, allowing her to move larger objects at the same time as Zelda moving. This is used to move large boulders, or uncover treasure from the ground. You can also reposition enemies, and here in the trailer they showed Zelda simply moving an enemy off a cliff, and they’d fall to their death.

Bind can be used in conjunction with Echoes, and here we’re getting into similar territory of Link’s abilities in Tears of the Kingdom. Reverse Bond is another ability which allows Zelda to attach to an item or enemy to fly or move faster.

Jumping into the void

We see something interesting at the end of the trailer, and that’s Tri creating a hole in the void and Zelda jumping into it. I think this could either be something like shrines, or perhaps this is Zelda exploring the void which is a dark world-type situation. Zelda has to go in there and save Link eventually, but it’ll be interesting to see if it’s somewhere Zelda can dive into, and then freely come back to Hyrule, or these are self contained spaces, similar to shrines. Let me know in the comments what you think.

Summary

The big takeaway from this trailer for me was how much inspiration is being taken from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Zelda has a couple of new abilities, creating echoes and bind. Echoes is new and bind looks similar to Ultrahand, even though it likely behaves in a very different way. The combination of creating echoes and binds is going to be very interesting.

There are other elements too like the Adventure Log, plus the ability to combine ingredients, and getting new outfits. Cooking has been a huge part of the open world games, and we’re getting elements here that are very similar. The outfits make a lot of sense, given Zelda has had a lot of looks over the years, and we saw a good variety of looks here in Echoes of Wisdom, plus they aren’t going to just be cosmetic, they’re going to impact gameplay too.

On first look this looked to be an iteration on the Link’s Awakening style, but Nintendo have ramped up the information here today with this 5 and a half minute trailer. Who needs a Nintendo Direct when Nintendo can randomly drop a trailer on Twitter on a Monday morning like this, it was a great surprise and there’s a lot of information to pour over.

Some of the questions I have, and will follow up in later videos, is what new information we have to identify the timeline placement? We knew about the Deku Srubs, the arguing Sea and River Zora. Kakariko being at the base of the Eldin Volcano seems important.

Lots of great new information, and I’d love to hear what you think about this trailer. How are your hype levels? Are you going to be playing Echoes of Wisdom when it comes out and what more do you want to see from Nintendo when it comes to the build up. We don’t have long to wait now, this game releases in a month and a half on 26 September on Nintendo Switch.

I’m going to be covering the game much like I did with Tears of the Kingdom so expect plenty of guides and more. Let me know in the comments what you want to see from my coverage from Echoes of Wisdom.


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