Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

@Matt_Barber I mean... crows also break the game economy 😆 rupees are definitely easy to get in that game... I ended with like 10,000 I had nothing to do with.

Just started this game yesterday, just beat Echo Ganon in Hyrule Castle. The game is pretty fun, I love all of the different ways you can use Echoes and sic enemies against each other. It does feel like it's designed to be flexible too. I really only have a few issues:

1. Switch Echoes of course. Nothing else that needs to be said about this one.
2. The lock-on. Really it's more the Echo A.I. than the lock-on itself. I keep frantically pressing ZL to tell them where to go and they still don't seem to know where to go.
3. The story. It is so weird that no one seems to know who Link and Ganon are, and even weirder that Link was randomly just fighting the Rifts on his own before he got trapped.

There's a good foundation for a fun gameplay style here but it could use a few tweaks.

@Bolt_Strike I've found it a lot faster to spawn new echoes after selecting a target, rather than waiting for the active ones to finish whatever they're doing before prioritizing the target.

As for Link, to be fair, he's always just a random guy doing his own thing. This Link just happened to be able to do his thing without socializing much. People around Suthorn and Kakariko do know him though.

@Bolt_Strike Personally, I rarely found the need to lock on to a echo after it was summoned unless it was a puzzle where I didn't really have other echoes around distracting me. But if I did need to and there was a big enough crowd to make it hard to lock onto the one I wanted, I usually just pressed the clear everything button and re-summoned. Not 100% ideal, but it was fast enough it was never much bother.

@FishyS It's the difference between accumulating rupees at the rate of about ten per fight, without having to go out of your way much, or four hundred in a single farming session.

Either way, you definitely won't be short of them by the end game.

@Matt_Barber I agree, there are plenty of ways to get rupees. But personally I never once had to think about how to farm them or sell anything-- I always had more than enough to buy what I needed at every shop or npc. Weirdly often in the early game I often had essentially the exact amount I needed to buy whatever accessory was on sale, but in late game I was overflowing with rupees.

Love how the various species are depicted in this game,
but felt that the mountain was a little barren and needed more than just the couple of yeti.
Probably the rito.

The woods could also have done with the koroks I think.
Might have been difficult to make the kokiri distinct from hylians in the chibi style.

Just beat it a moment ago. It was definitely on the short side though I’ve yet to complete all side quests I just don’t know if there is any reason to do so? Does it change the ending if you do?

@GameOtaku There are a LOT of types of collectibles, hidden things, and side quests. I basically finished it all before I hit the credits. Took me about 45 hours which I think is the most time I've ever spent on a top-down Zelda playthrough. Sure you can skip most things similarly to BotW, so it just depends on what you want to do. Personally I wasn't obsessively going for 100%, I was just exploring and having fun.

Edit: For what it's worth, according to howlongtobeat EoW is in fact the longest top-down Zelda.

Just beat Faron Temple. Gotta say, I saw some complaints on previous pages about the dungeons in this game being too linear, but this one felt a bit more mazelike. It seems like they were going for somewhat of a Skull Woods vibe with multiple entrances (but not enough for it to feel like a ripoff though) that you have to navigate, and while it's not quite as complex, it does feel a bit mazelike. I still have to do the Eldin and Lanayru dungeons (don't spoil it for me, I want to experience them myself) so not sure if it's just this dungeon or they're ramping up the design for the later game dungeons like OoT does, but I think this dungeon is closer to what they all should be like.

@GameOtaku
I 100%ed the game and I did not encounter a secret ending for doing so. But if you feel like going for 100% then go for it. I thought it was fun.

@Jhena
I wonder then if it’s similar to the Links Awakening secret ending in which you have to not die once.

@GameOtaku
Game8 says there is no secret ending like in Link's Awakening.

This format wouldn’t lend itself to a (casual) no-death run anyway, since it’s more like BotW where you could die in the blink of an eye for a silly mistake or unfortunate enemy/echo placement.

And that’d make it frustrating for a lot of people wanting to see the secret ending.

Really? Because so far I've only died twice in this game, and both of them were against bosses. The first was Smog (this was my first time fighting him, I didn't know he was in Oracle of Ages until looking it up just now because I never played it), the second was against Echo Ganon. The regular gameplay isn't too hard, it's some of the bosses that are tough. Really I think the issue is that Zelda is too slow to be able to dodge attacks well, and some of these bosses spam attacks relatively quickly to the point where it can be difficult to dodge them well until you learn their attack patterns. I have yet to be killed by silly little mistakes in the normal gameplay like you say, usually if things get really bad I just retreat to a safe area, heal up in the bed, and try again.

@Bolt_Strike it’s a game that allows you to go basically anywhere after the intro section, including areas with enemies that could realistically kill zelda in one or two hits. So it’s not hard to see how it could happen to someone who goes exploring early on, instead of keeping themselves to the story beats.

I only got two game overs early on, and both were against moblin hordes because I lost track of Zelda’s health during the action.

After that, I learned to carry around a full bags worth of smoothies.

With the power of mango smoothies, fairy bottles and the defense-up charm, Zelda can face-tank pretty much anything.

Also, on the off chance that you still die, the game makes it very easy to savescum back to an earlier autosave without losing much progress.

I played to essentially 100% completion and died only once I believe. And it was an utterly avoidable death on a mini boss where I thought I had a fairy( but didn't) so wasn't being careful. Note that I walked into the high level jungle in the south quite early and obtained a bunch of echoes I couldn't actually summon yet so I wasn't avoiding dangerous areas. I was playing on the easier mode, but I think it would be reasonably easy to play a casual no-death run on the harder mode as a second playthrough. Also, my 1 death was before I realized the bed restores all your hearts.... between cheap smoothies, the OP bed, and several fairies there are lots of ways to stay alive. Once I realized the bed heals you I rarely used smoothies or fairies. Oh, and the fact that bottomless pits don't kill you... if they did I would have died a bunch.

I don't actually think the game needs a secret ending, but a casual no-death run sounds kind of fun

For what it's worth, I never used the Link power-up on any bosses; I mostly stayed safe and let my echoes slaughter everything.

Edit: A no-damage run of this game would be insanely hard though.

@Matt_Barber Rather than using smoothies or fairies, I really enjoyed healing by taking a nap in the middle of boss fights — I even put on pajamas first!

I found smoothies kinda useless. I only used them as potions for replenishing hearts, and that's about it. It wasn't as well implemented as cooking in BotW, and pretty much fell flat for me.

@VoidofLight I kept expecting there to be climbing mini games or whatever which were hard without using an appropriate potion but there never was. Missed opportunity.