Echoes Of Wisdom Should Mean More Zelda Spin Offs

I'm never entirely sure if it's a weakness or a strength that Nintendo relies on the same series decade in and decade out. Right now, the biggest guns in the Nintendo arsenal are Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon. Just like they were in the '90s, and '00s, and '10s. There's room for shuffling - Smash and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Animal Crossing have grown in cultural cache with each entry, Metroid is up and down, Kirby is not the star he once was, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fire Emblem is at its peak, and Star Fox... Well, we don't talk about Star Fox anymore. This reliance on a small roster has led to innovation, the latest of which is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Echoes of Wisdom. But what comes next?

Echoes of Wisdom is the first major Zelda game where you can actually play as Zelda. Th✅at's something of an innovation in itself, while the game also introduces a more active use of magic into the series, reimagining what dungeon crawling looks like without the Master Sword (or some breakable stick you just found) by your side. It also feels like a rare instance of The Legend of Zelda being pushed into doing something that is notably dif🎐ferent to what came before.

On the face of it, this sounds like a stupid point to make. Don't worry, I can be a fairly stupid person. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild transformed not only the boundaries of a Zelda game, but the entire industry's approach to the open world formula. Through 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and A Link to the Past, the seriꦿes has always been iterating on itself, telling its classic fairy story in new ways, supplemented by new mechanics. Compared to Pokemon, which has been largely treading water with the same basic game for almost its entire life cycle, the Zelda series seems highly inventive.

Should Zelda Have A Wider Variety Of Games?

Zelda and Tri in the Hebra Mountain Cave rift with the other Tris.

But for the specific point I'm making, Pokemon is actually way better than Zelda. Sure, the mainline games are repetitive, but we have Pokken, Snap, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mystery Dungeon, PokePark, the vastly underrated Conquest, and dozens more. Mario, the third force in Nintendo's main triumvirate, has an even greater variety of games out there. Golf, Party, Kart, Tennis... you name a casual activity and Mario has done it. Mario also has the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Paper series, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the RPG series, the & Luigi series, the + Rabbids series, and that's before you get into Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, and Toജad all having their own fully fledged spin offs. Zelda? It's got the Zelda 🍷games.

Echoes of Wisdom is in between all of these. It's still, at heart, a mainline Zelda game. You can even play as Link in it. But it's certainly smaller than 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom, and the next Zelda game will be seen as TOTK's true follow up. Echoes is a stop gap, an amuse pouce. You play as Zelda, but it's no Princess Pea😼ch: Showtime. It's not a separate thing from The Legend of Zelda, but it's also not really a 'proper' The Legend o▨f Zelda game. So what is it?

If you wryly giggled to yourself at my t🅰ypo in amuse bouche, it is in fact you who are the subject of giggles, as pouce means 'thumb', making it a very sophisticated and urbane slice of ꦏwit.

Zelda has always been a series to look onwards and upwards, and Echoes feels like a step backwards. Not in terms of overall quality, necessarily, but in ambition and scope. This is not a series that peppers its timeline with smaller releases too often, certainly not in the Switch era, and Echoes feels like a decision to embrace a wider world of Zelda that remains connected to the ‘main’ series, whatever that means. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:That this began life as a Zelda Maker shows a desire to experiment on new ideas within the Ze👍lda framework, and I don’t think Echoes will have full꧙y satiated that desire.

Do Other Series Need Their Own Echoes Of Wisdom?

Zelda and Tri riding a horse, holding a piece of heart.

Maybe the question isn’t so much what Echoes i🅺s meant to be. It is what it is, and Zelda has never been a series with a desire to fit into a neat little box. The question is, what comes next? Will we see true Zelda spin offs in its wake? We've had them before with Hyrule Warriors or Cadence of Hyrule, but they were both reskins of other series. Meanwhile, its original spin offs have never been serious and earnest games like Super Mario RPG or Pokemon 🔯Conquest. So do we get more games like Echoes? A real Zelda Maker? Will the series go the kart racer route? Probably not that exactly (why give Mario competition?), but Echoes could be the foundation of a more expansive future for Zelda.

Alternatively, it could be a stepping stone for others. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Animal Crossing: New Horizons took the series from being a fairly popular Nintendo mainstay into one that’s ascending to superstardom. The game was consistently supported with events, then a full DLC, but it's odd that a series so rich with characters and activities hasn't followed up New Horizons with a spin off that banks on its popularity. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Most fans don't ﷺeven know it has a movie ♌- largely because it isn't available in the West without a fan translation.

There are other series besides Animal Crossing, and other ways for Zelda to expand besides doing different sports to Mario (Zelda Cricket, anyone?). Maybe Echoes of Wisdom is just another game and in a few years we get the true follow up to TOTK and the world keeps on turning. But this seems like a new direction for a꧒ series that has always followed good ideas until it ꧅strikes gold, and I wonder what riches Echoes of Wisdom will eventually lead to.