The Ringer-Verse - ‘The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ Reactions | Button Mash

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Ben summons Justin Charity for a spoiler-free but in-depth discussion about Nintendo’s new ‘The Legend of Zelda’ release for Switch, ‘Echoes of Wisdom.’ After they give their high-level capsule reviews of the game, they catch up on some recent news, including the teaser for ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, the announcement of (and trailer for) ‘Ghost of Yotei,’ the delay of ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows,’ and Nintendo’s lawsuit against ‘Palworld’ maker Pocket Pair (6:00). After that, they describe their experiences with ‘Echoes,’ explore how it synthesizes aspects of its open-world and top-down predecessors, examine the contrast between playing as Zelda and playing as Link, and share their hopes for the future of the franchise (33:40). Host: Ben Lindbergh Guest: Justin Charity Producer: Devon Renaldo Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Services not available in all areas. Hello and welcome into the ringerverse, your nexus speed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, senior editor for the ringer and minibus of Button Mash. If you want to save Hyrule or host a podcast, it's dangerous to go alone. Link has Fye, Zelda has Try,

and I have a companion who's a hero of legend in his own right, a man who never echoes the Confirmation. conventional wisdom, who does not need a sword to make a cutting remark. It's ringer, senior staff, writer, Justin Charity. I'm going to say hi. I wish I had like a signature sound effect like tries to make whenever you chimi up like that. It's usually better for a Zelda companion to be seen and not heard historically in the history of the franchise. Listen, listen.

Listen. Yes, but not on a podcast. We definitely want our guest slash co-host to talk. But as long as you don't tell me that a door is locked and I need to open it too many times, we should be good. It was just last year that we did multiple pods on Tears of the Kingdom, but the goddesses have already blessed us with another Zelda game, maybe the most Zelda game yet. So we are here today to discuss the 17th-ish, depending on how you count, mainline installment in the Legend of Zelda series and the first to feature a playable Zelda. Echoes of Wisdom, which came out this week for the venerable Switch. Nintendo sent us this one pre-release, so I have finished the game.

You got it after me, so you're a few dungeons in, but we will discuss it in some depth without specific story spoilers, for those of you who are just getting your hands on it or still deciding whether you want to, and we also want to react to a few items of non-Zelda news. But before we do that, and before we dive deeper into the game, it's just a lot. Just give our quick high-level snapshot takes to let people know what they can expect to hear from us today. What do you make of Echoes of Wisdom? I'm a big fan of it.

Just on the pure mechanically, I guess we can decide how much we want to get into the sort of story and style of this game. But I think mechanically, yeah, man, killer app. This game is a killer app, you know? Yeah, I'm pretty much with you. on that one. Arjuna texted me on Thursday and said, is the new Zelda game good? And I said, yes. And he said, ooh, okay, I'm going to get it. And I was like, look, Arjuna, I appreciate your trust in my opinion. But the answer to the question, is the new Zelda game good, has been yes for almost 40 years now, going back to the beginning. I don't know that anyone would ever say no about an authentic,

full-fledged mainline Zelda game. Is the new Zelda game good is kind of a does a bear shit in the woods caliber question. Not to pick up, pick on Arjuna here, but you, you hardly have to ask. But I guess there's a difference between is the Zelda game good and is the new Zelda game great? Nintendo just opened a museum in Kyoto dedicated to itself. And so you might wonder, is Echoes a museum quality Zelda? And maybe there were a few reasons why you might wonder, you might doubt. A, of course, it's the first Nintendo partially developed playable Zelda game. And so you might have thought, well, is this going to be like the Princess Peach games

are to Mario, where it's sort of a lesser spin-off, maybe still fun, but more simple, less fully developed. And then also I mentioned that this is co-developed, so it was co-developed by Grezo, which is the studio that has developed the last several Nintendo Legend of Zelda remakes and remasters. And this is their first time really at the helm, building a ground-up Nintendo Legend of Zelda adventure. And so those might have given you some pause, made you wonder.

But no, don't fear, don't doubt. This is as much a Zelda game as any Legend of Zelda game featuring Link. And it's really good. I am really liking this game or I guess liked because I'm done with it now. But I might dive back into it just to see all the optional stuff because it's really that good. And it's long. Stamp guy misses you. Stamp guy.

Stamp guy. I need you to come back. I have not completed my last page of stamps, so I do have still a few stamps to find. But this game, I think a lot of the puzzles in this game are straining to get over gaps and get from one side of things to another and build bridges. And that's kind of what this game is doing, right?

It's trying to build a bridge between generations and styles of Zelda games, the old school top down and the more free-roaming open world, Breath of the Wild tiers of the kingdom style game. And sometimes you can feel that strain that it's sort of struggling to bridge those gaps and meld those different styles of Zelda games. But for the most part, I think it makes it over the gap. And I think it actually synthesizes those types of Zelda experiences into something that feels like those other two kinds, but also something on its own, something new, something

fresh. So I think we're aligned here. Yes, the new Zelda game is good. maybe even great. All right, we don't want to divulge too much of what we think about this game before we really sink our teeth into it. So let's do a few items of news here, some reactions to recent stuff that's happened in the video game world, and then we will return to echoes of wisdom. The nice thing about doing this podcast typically a couple times per month is that there's never any shortage of things to talk about. The challenge is that there's often too much to talk about,

and we can't cover every good game or every bit of news or every rumor. However, some things rise to the level of let's at least offer a brief reaction to this. And maybe you can start with some Sony franchise related news. First, we got a Last of Us Day teaser for the Last of Us season two. It's a couple minutes, but it's the first significant look with new footage that we've seen of the second season. We see Ellie, we see Joel, we see Jackson, Wyoming, we see Abby, we see a seraphite, We see Jeffrey Wright reprising his role as Isaac. We see the incredible Catherine O'Hara as an original psychiatrist character.

What did you make of what we have seen and what we didn't see in this trailer? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to me that the decision here is to go straight to the Last of Us, too. Right? Like that at least appears to be what's going on, right? And I think, well, okay, I think a couple things. One, it will be interesting to see to how normal people react to the direction of The Last of Us 2. Yeah, which we will not spoil here to be clear. Yeah.

It's just flashbacks to when the game came out and it just being, it wasn't even when the game came out. It was remember when it was that leak. That leak. I forget how many, it was like a full year. It felt like in advance of the game coming out, the leak of a lot of the direction of the game. And from that leak all the way through the release of The Last of Us 2, man, the discourse about that sequel, which is incredibly toxic. And now we're sort of in a pop culture landscape where toxic conversations about sequels is like the norm. But at the time, we were really breaking.

We're pioneering new ground. Last of Us 2, The Game. And I could have imagined an alternative scenario where with the TV, show, they maybe went off in another direction or maybe filled in some gaps between the Last of Us and the Last of Us part two and then eventually came to this. But I mean, we're full steam ahead into a very divisive, you know, adapting like a very divisive game that I think left. I think even people who enjoy The Last of Us too, right? Like that game, I remember when you wrote about it, Ben, you were just like, I feel bad. Yeah. Your piece was like, I feel bad.

I think you respected it, but you were just like, I feel bad. Like this game was your takeaway, right? That was mid-pandemic. It was not ideal timing to play a game like that. Not that it's exactly like uplifting, even if everything's going great in the world, which is not the case now either. But yes, I think I have not been moved to revisit it with the re-release, the remaster. It's just too soon, you know.

So I think I'll be ready by next year when this year. when this season comes out. We still don't ever release date, and it's just seven episodes. We know that much. But I'm ready to revisit it and to be miserable all over again. But didn't Druckman?

I think Druckman had been, like, talking to the press. I think maybe the day before that teaser footage came out, right? I remember seeing some quote from Drucken being like, well, of course, you know, we'll make tweaks to the story, right,

from the second game. And I've always wondered that, right? about a season two of The Last of Us, where I think I'd been assuming that, sure, let's do a straight up adaptation of The Last of Us, too. There's a tension there, right, between adapting something to TV and taking the opportunity to maybe do stuff a bit differently. Suddenly the first season of the show did that, right? Or sort of, like, elaborating on stuff in the medium of television

in a way that's different from how, like, arcs were developed in the game. I just think that with two, how much of it is going to be trying to do stuff creatively with the TV adaptation versus how much of it is going to be defensiveness about how that game was received, right? Or how much of it is going to feel like capitulation to criticism of The Last of Us part two? It'll be, I think it'll be interesting to see that that mix of capitulation, defensiveness.

Yeah. And just kind of ignoring it, right? And just being like, no, you know, we told a good story. People like this franchise. Yeah, that's mostly what I'm curious to see. You can ignore it, I think, just because as big as the game and the game series are, the show is bigger than those ever were in terms of just the number of people who watched it, it's just its salience in mainstream pop culture.

So, yes, I think part of the reason season one is good is that you did have Druckman and people who were just integrally involved with the game, also involved in that way with the series. but it's maybe also good to not be too beholden to we're defending what we did the first time or we're trying to anticipate backlash. Although, yes, a lot of the reactions to even season one, even to the finale, to the decision Joel makes, so much of that mirrors things that were the response to the first game that we all remember from years and years ago. And so I'm sure something similar will happen here.

But I think there's more of a question of what will this season structure look like than in the first season, which was a fairly faithful adaptation. Obviously, they took some detours and were able to zoom in on some stuff that was sort of skipped over, not really mentioned in the game. But this time around, and again, it's hard to know how to talk about this because I'm sure many button mash listeners know and have played the last of us part two, but many rig reverse listeners have not. And I don't want to spoil anything for them. But there is much more of a question, I think, about what will be in this season as opposed to the future seasons. because we know that the game, the second game, will be divided into more than one season of television here.

And this teaser didn't really give us that many clues. I think it's primarily from sequences that you could identify as being from the first part of the game. But there are a couple glimpses in there of characters or scenes that you might think, huh, I might not have expected this to be in this season at all. So didn't really answer that pressing question about what the season will look like on the whole. Didn't answer the pressing question of,

how jacked will Abby be? That's what everyone really wants to know. That's really the main question. Also, do we get a remaster of the first season? Do we get a remake and then a remake? Yeah, it's been a couple of years. The first season. High time to really remake that thing.

Yeah, on the Last of Us schedule, it's about that point in the production timeline. But yeah, look, I'm excited. We'll be covering this. I don't know exactly how we will cover this on the Ringiverse. It wasn't really covered the first season so much on the Ringiverse. that was pre-button mash. So we'll see how we divide up the responsibilities, but we will certainly be covering that in one way or another, and I'm looking forward to getting into it

and experience all the discourse again for those who are coming to it for the first time. There is supposedly another adaptation of a Sony published game, Ghost of Sushima, in the works. We have not heard much lately about that movie, which is coming from the director of John Wick. However, we have gotten maybe some even more exciting news about that franchise. Closing out Sony's September state of play, we got a reveal and substantial trailer for the sequel. I guess it's not exactly a sequel. It's just the next installment in an anthology series. Ghost of Yote, which is coming again at some unspecified point next year.

Looks pretty beautiful. People were pretty hyped about this announcement. Did you enjoy this trailer? Yeah, and I never played Ghost of Sashima, though. Got to get into that. Yeah, I was going to say, like, I know a lot of people on staff are super into it. The classic juxtaposition of like, because it didn't ghost in Sekaro come out like kind of around the same time, but it was kind of the clash of the Japanese lore, samurai games.

And I was late to both of them, but then got super into Sekaro and still haven't gotten around a ghost. But I'll definitely catch up just because, yeah, I have mentioned. for a long time. Certainly excited. Yeah, this is something that we talked about when the new Assassin's Creed was announced. Assassons Creed Shadows, which is also set in Japan. We talked at the time of just how many mainstream prominent movies, shows, games are set in feudal Japan these days. And part of me is like, we'll bring it on. I'm enjoying all of these things. But part of me is also wondering at what point is everyone just sort of telling stories in the same time and place roughly.

Now, this game is set a few centuries after Ghost of Sashima, which was set earlier than, say, Blue Eye Samurai or Shogun or Rise of the Ronan, right? There are just so many kind of clustered here. This one is set in the early 1600s, which is very much in the Blue Eye Samurai and Shogun kind of time, though not place. It's set in Hokkaido, and it looks very beautiful. There's a lot of nature here. This is obviously developed by Sucker Punch for the PS5, not just a remaster or a remake. So this thing, I think, will probably show off what this system can do. If you're someone who's looking for some kind of showcase for the PS5 Pro, which is not really me, as we talked about last time,

then maybe this is a game that will actually show off the potential, the horsepower of that system. But I liked that they're skipping a few centuries, that they're telling a story set in a different time of place. And given how good that first game is, even if the field is a little saturated these days. And you got to think, Ubisoft saw this and was like, oh, man, like we just, they're coming. They're going to take our lunch money here. Like, we're trying to put out shadows. We're trying to top rise of the Ronan. And here comes Ghosos Hashima sequel follow up.

And now everyone's more excited for this than our game. I would think that's probably the reaction. So there's a lot of hype for this. And it still just goes to show, you know, we talked on the Astrobot pod about Sony's shift from first-party developed games to more always-on-line kind of money-minting games, at least in theory, and an Astrobot being kind of a throwback and a showcase for some of those games that we haven't seen in some time.

And here you have a Sony published game that everyone's just immediately super excited about and is not thinking, like, give things. me micro transactions and make it always online and make it into a destiny style never-ending game. We just want the curated, handcrafted, beautifully told story that we got from Gosa Shushima. And it seems like that's likely what's in store here. Yeah, Japanese historians are eaten right now. Japanese history. It's true.

We back up. Yeah, we never went down. But that, I guess, leads us to the third of. of four news items that we wanted to talk about, which is that Ubisoft delayed Assassin's Creed Shadows, which was slated for this November and was going to be one of the big games of the holiday season. And now it's not.

And this was not a direct response. Like, oh shit, Ghost of Yote's coming out. We better make our game better to compete with that. You know, like drink forcing you to push your album back. Yeah, it's not that. Right. Yeah. No, if anything, you'd think they would want to get this thing out before everyone's playing ghost.

But they have delayed the new AC to February next February. And in their announcement of this, they made reference to lessons they've learned from Star Wars Outlaws. And the feedback that they've gotten to that, some of the complaints that Arjuna and Jomey and I had when we did our Outlaws pod, Ubisoft is now addressing by patching and fixing outlaws after its release, which is nothing new, obviously, for a video game, but slightly unusual in the way. that they're adapting and adjusting this one. And because of that, because that game hasn't sold as well as they expected it to or hoped it would, it hasn't been received with the glowing reviews that they were hoping for, they're now delaying Assassin's Creed to hopefully get this thing right. And look, I'm always in favor of making the game the best it can be as opposed to getting it

out sooner. But we now have a situation where the competition will be intense if this thing actually comes out in February, the release schedule for that month is super, super crowded. Whenever I'm on this pod with you, Ben, and we're talking about Assassin's Creed, I'm always the guy. I feel like an indifferent god looking over distant affairs, right? Because I've never been into AC. And it feels like Assassin's Creed fandom is always going through it whenever I check in on you guys. You know what I mean? And I feel this sense of like, we could do an entire episode or an entire series of episodes about.

kind of like long-running franchises that have become embattled, basically. The two that come to mind are just like, Assassin's Creed and Far Cry. Like, those are the two franchises where I just think, you guys need a win. Because you never seem happy. It's just like a fandom of people who are never happy with the latest installment in that thing. Yeah. The state of the union address about Assassin's Creed. Because it's just has been such a, it just feels like it's been such a,

malaise in terms of the rollout of this, the buildup to and then roll out of this game. Yeah, and Ubisoft made reference to perception problems of Ubisoft proper, not necessarily Assassin's Creed, but of course, you were just talking about toxic discourse about caves and Shadows has certainly been a part of that to the point that Ubisoft felt a need to address it, which I'm not sure that helped and actually catering to those calls. Perhaps that just kind of feeds the trolls to some extent. But of course, whenever you get a female protagonist of a game that has not historically had a female protagonist, you're going to get people accusing you of going woke or whatever in these just manufactured outrages. And, you know, I guess there's probably

some of that surrounding Ghost of Yote too. And who knows, maybe even about echoes of wisdom, though in that case, people have been begging for a Zelda game for so long that I think it's probably exempt. But all of that, I never really know whether even to address it, because it is just so common and so tired and to bring it up, I feel like only gives it power in a sense. Well, I don't know. I mean, I see why they put out this. Like, it's tough.

Like, I don't know that I agree that it's feeding the trolls to address it. I do think that after a point, like, look, gaming culture is what it is. You kind of have to take it on its terms. And you just have these kind of persistent arguments about representation and what the line is between. like diversification versus like pandering or whatever people think they're arguing about. And I think the truth is that like for a lot of these companies, there's just no, there's no good

option. There is no like, oh, if we take, you know, if we if we go with door C, that's the right thing and everyone will be happy. I think you just have these sort of like sub factions of gaming culture who just don't like each other, don't agree, don't have the same priorities for what video games should be trying to do with like storytelling and characterization and yeah man that's just the landscape

and I don't like there is no right answer other than just trying to like tell the best stories you can and you know yeah make the game good I think is easier said than done make the game good right yeah make the writing good yeah exactly right

you know no one's going to be complaining about shoehorned in themes or characters or whatever if these things are fully developed. I mean, you know, some small minority of people will complain regardless, right? Because they just want attention or they're just so aggrieved about these things. But no one else is going to care if the game is good. No one else is going to complain these ridiculous complaints about what the protagonist of outlaws looks like, you know, just sort of silly stuff. And really not the main gripes that someone would have after playing that game. This is kind of online clout chasing in a lot of cases, I think.

And if the game is good, then that is what will resonate. And that is what people will remember about the game. But is the game good? Now, that's a question you could ask about Assassin's Creed and not be confident in the answer, right? Often, it's good. Often, not so much. And to their credit, they've taken a step back and they've slowed the release schedule. And we'll see if that pays dividends.

But I feel bad now for anyone who delayed their game into February 2025. Because when Microsoft delayed a vowed, which was supposed to come out this year, their statement said, we're moving avowed to February 18th, 2025, to give players backlogs some breathing room. Now, that's not the only reason, I'm sure. But if that was a part of the motivation, that kind of backfired because everyone else had that same thought. And now everyone's backlogs are just going to be bigger than ever in February because you have avowed, you have kingdom come deliverance to which got delayed into February. and now you're going to have Assassin's Creed on top of Civilization 7, on top of the new Like a Dragon game, Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, which what the hell?

I love it. Best title on the market at least. They looked at the teaser for the adaptation on Prime Video and they're like, this doesn't seem silly enough. Let's lean into the absurd here. And then you have Monster Hunter Wilds coming out at the end of that month and lost records, the new follow-up from the makers of Life is Strange? Like, that's just going to be one of those months. And who knows, you know, some of these games might turn out to be that good, or some

of them might get delayed again. But every now and then, you just have this super stack of games that happen to end up coming out around the same time. And you feel bad for some of them, because inevitably, some will get lost in the shuffle. And then you wonder, like, should you just delay again to get out of the way of these other mega blockbusters? But it's tough. That's just it's really crowded all year long now. It's hard to find a time that you can kind of own, you know, you look at like the plucky squire or something that just came out between Astrobot and Echoes of Wisdom and like, good luck, you know, getting some oxygen at that point. There are all these great games, you know, Space Marine 2 and UFO 50 and so many games that even

I, I as someone who covers this stuff. It's like, I wish I had time for that or time to talk about that, but you're just competing with so many other major releases. Yeah, yeah. And the last thing we wanted to talk about, and this will segue into our return to Echoes of Wisdom, is that Nintendo is, in fact, suing Powell World. Here we go. Let's do this. Let's cover this.

Let's talk about that. And the Pokemon company jointly suing Powerworld. Now, look, you can run, you can hide, but you cannot evade Nintendo's lawyers forever. They will come for you. And usually they come for you. for you quickly, which is why if I had been Power World, I would have been lulled into a

false sense of security by how long Nintendo took to actually bring this. Because when we did our emergency Power World pods early this year, we talked about the possibility. There was a lot of speculation even then. Will there be some kind of case here? Will Nintendo go after

Power World? And Nintendo had put out that cryptic statement very non-specific, you know, like, we're aware that there's a game that people are talking about and we'll look into it. And they took their sweet time several months to actually decide to move forward with this. And it's not a copyright case. It's not, hey, these pals look too much like Pokemon as far as we can tell. It's a patent infringement case. And of course, Nintendo hasn't divulged details about that case because Nintendo doesn't divulge details about anything.

But eventually that will come out. We don't know the exact specifics, but we know that Nintendo and the Pokemon company, they are actually going after Power World. Wait, but okay, here's the thing. My favorite thing about this whole Nintendo Power World storyline is, to your point, about Nintendo taking the sweet time, all of the statements from Nintendo at this point have this kind of lethal air to them. It's like a Tonberry in like fall of fantasy, right? Where it's like, it will kill you.

It's like walking up to you slowly. Yeah. And there's this, ah, we are considering very. somberly are option. And it's just very ominous statements. Yeah, the fact that they've been biding their time for so long, like until they're ready to strike. Yes, it would psych me out, sort of.

Yeah, no, exactly. Did you look at the, because they're, I believe, like to your point about it being a patent complaint, there are documents from the American side and then from the Japanese side. And I just remember I saw on threads somewhere like a bit of illustration from one of the patent applications for Pokemon. Yes. Did you see this artwork?

It's the Pokemon throwing a ball? Yes. It's the throwing the pokeball mechanic is maybe something that has been patented recently. And it's always tough in video games to determine like what you can patent. What is a mechanic that is proprietary as opposed to just shared? And I think gamers want these things to be shared. And we want games to build on each other. and learn from each other.

This is what we talked about when Power World came out, like, okay, this is uncomfortably close in some senses, but also it's synthesizing all these different, very identifiable influences into something that is its own creation, and you don't want to kind of discourage that by having, like, patent trolls for video games and, you know, sort of squatting on things and saying, well, you can't make a game like this, because we did that already.

But in this case, it seems like there's maybe a specific mechanic to kind of capture monsters out in the 3D world. With a ball. It's a little too specific, I think it's the thing. Yes. So we'll see what happens here. I think it'll be an interesting case maybe for the future of video games. And Power World has partnered with Sony now,

and they're developing properties based on the Power World. And Power World just came out for PS5, though I think not in Japan. So the Power World phenomenon continues. And we will see whether that gets halted at all by Nintendo. here, which is, you know, looking for revenue, which is looking for penalties, essentially, for saying you did this thing that we did first and that you can't copy. So, you know, there are many cases where it seems like there's Nintendo overreach. And often that's with fanmaids, mods and games and, you know, making sheet music based on music and Nintendo games that you can't

actually get anywhere else, right? And it's just so hyper litigious. But in this case, perhaps it is not Nintendo overreach. Perhaps there will be. some legitimate complaint here, and we'll see what the ramifications of that will be. Yeah, good luck. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. Well, I think that is a good segue into Echoes of Wisdom, which is maybe the most Pokemon-like Zelda game we've ever seen, because there is absolutely a got-to-catch-em-all aspect to this

game with the Echoes. Before we get to that, we've talked about trailers and teasers. Let's just list some coming attractions on the Ring orverse feed, our programming notes. On Monday, we will cap off September with this month's edition of Ringaverse Recommends, which I can tell you will feature a couple of video game recommendations. If you're hearing this episode shortly after it goes up, we're still in the market for a listener nomination for this month's Ringaverse Recommend. So you can email Ringaverse

Recommends at gmail.com. Midweek Mint Edition will have a Here Comes the Pitch episode on villain movies. And on Friday, the Midnight Boys, Poo-Pew, will be offering their instant reactions to Joker, Foli Adieu. By the way, my daughter who turns three on Monday, happy birthday Sloan, has started saying pew-pue, not as a tribute to the Midnight Boys, but because she was watching me play Star Wars Outlaws, and she asked me what CaveS was doing, and I didn't want to explain the concept of gun violence and blasters. So I said she was going Pew-Pew.

So now Sloan runs around saying Pew-Pew. I don't know if this makes me a good parent, a bad parent, possibly, is Star Wars Outlaws age-appropriate for a not-yet-year-old. I smile upon. You. I smile to find you, Ben Lindberg. I've been pretty permissive when it comes to introducing her to games. I mean, you know, I'm not playing like Diablo or, you know, like. Resident Evil 6? Well, you do. We haven't gotten to that yet exactly. But the more kid-friendly stuff, you know, it's pretty free reign at this point. So she likes Echoes of Wisdom, if anyone who is wondering, though not as much as Astrobot. I was playing Echoes of Wisdom. And she's like, can we please play Astrobot again? I get it. Anyway, House of R will have rings of power. all along and Joker coverage coming to the House of our feed, our sister feed here at the Ringiverse. And Buttonmash will be back in October.

The first half of October is like charity core. There's the Silent Hill 2 remake. There's metaphor refontasio. There's Tomb Raider, the legend of Lara Craft. There's the 10th anniversary of alien isolation, which we would like to discuss. This is just nonstop bangers for you. How are you going to allocate your time next month?

Listen, you know, it's, funny too because metaphor refantazio specifically like i've been on a roller coaster of expectations because it's like atlas i love atlas but then i didn't necessarily love the sort of fantasy direction or style of it and then man i loaded that demo up yesterday and they really first of all the intro is so classic shimagami tensei where it's just sort of like ethereal and what is your name you know like also it has like this like gravity rush like i was like trying to put my finger on it and i was talking this Steve Allman, I was like, that's what it is. Like, the style of this is like gravity rush, weirdly, in terms of the art style of it.

I love gravity rush. But I think otherwise mechanically so far, I think they're doing a good job of splitting. I think the mechanical stuff I like about mainline SMT games and the kind of pizzazz of the persona game. So I'm feeling it so far. I'm feeling it. Oh, boy. Yeah. Students of Japanese history are backup.

You are also backup. right now. This is going to be a big, big month for you. Well, we will talk about some of that next time and the time after. We're still working out exactly what we're going to cover. So feel free to email us at ringerversegaming at gmail.com about anything, but also about what you'd like to hear us discuss. This episode is brought to you by weather tech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and make it a mess. You don't need weather tech floor liners in the summer unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner or road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips.

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that score high in both comfort and style, Viori is my MVP. Sunday performance joggers? Oh, yeah. They have the perfect. I could watch a game and then go out to dinner vibe. And the metapant, That's my number one.

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Dunton Ranch starring Colehouser, Kelly Riley, Annette Benning, and Ed Harris now streaming on Paramount Plus. Now, let's get back to Echoes of Wisdom and let's dive deep into this thing. So I wanted to talk to you specifically for this one because we come to this game with different backgrounds in Zelda. because I'm a guy who got the gold cartridge, original Legend of Zelda for NES when I was, I think, six or seven years old, obviously had no idea what to do in that game,

but that was part of the appeal. And so I've been playing Zelda. I'm an OG with this franchise, and I guess you could say it's my favorite video game series of all time. And part of that, I think, is just that it is pretty unimpeachable in terms of if there's a new Zelda game coming out, you can kind of take to the bank that it's going to be worthwhile. So when I play a new Zelda game,

I always look forward to comparing to past Zelda's, figuring out how it fits in the canon, not narratively, but in terms of gameplay, graphics, items, abilities, what does each new game borrow from its predecessors and what does it do differently? It's like getting a new movie or book or album by an artist you like and trying to chart the evolution. Now, you have become a convert to Zelda more recently, right? You were, as I imagine many people, you've kind of come to this series more in the Breath of the Wild Tears of the Kingdom era. And so I thought you might have a different perspective on this than me as someone who hasn't spent a ton of time with the old 2D top-down Zelda's. And one thing that we talked about when we talked about tears last year

was that it'd be nice if there were still a lane for that, for the more retro style Zelda and not just like the Link's Awakening remake, but new original adventures in that vein. And that's something the IG Anuma, who's the overall head of the Zelda series, Nintendo published a dialogue among the developers of this game, as they sometimes do online. And Anuma said, I've always wanted to establish a 2D top-down The Legend of Zelda series that's separate from the 3D entries, like Breath of the Wild. The game style and how it feels are completely different when the world is viewed in 3D from behind the character to when the world is viewed from a top-down perspective. We wanted to cherish that kind of diversity in the Legend of Zelda series.

That was my request last year. Just give me some way to still retain that 2D top-down experience while also giving us these massive open worlds. And along comes echoes of wisdom to deliver that. So how successful a fusion do you feel like this is based on your knowledge of the old games and also your hands-on experience with the newer ones? Well, okay, yeah. I actually, that contrast, I feel like informs a lot of maybe why I like this game so much, right?

Because it's sort of, I can't remember all the beats of our conversation when we're talking about, like, when you and I have talked about Tears of the Kingdom, right? Like, I liked Tears, but I love Breath of the Wild. And I think Tears, Tears the Kingdom did this thing where Breath of the Wild is already this huge game that I think wild people because of its scope, right? that open world, it sort of made the open world formula, which had been kind of well-worned by that point, feel brand new all over again. It even took something like, you know, people in video games complained about like Ubisoft towers, right?

And yet it's like a huge part of the map layout of Breath of the Wild, and yet it felt like this is a game executing on really familiar concepts in what feels like a radically new way. Then Tears of the Kingdom, I think, ads, it just adds, like, what if more, what if more, more, more. And I think a lot of people like that, I feel like when a lot of people talk about Tears of the Kingdom,

they kind of talk about it is like, obviously an improvement on Breath of the Wild. I think with time, I kind of came to view Tears of the Kingdom is like, bloat, honestly. It's like a game that feels like, would have Zelda, but what if also Minecraft, right,

is what Tears the Kingdom feels like after a point. I love tears. I felt that way a bit about the depths that, okay, you're building on what was there, but this isn't as compelling to me as the rest of that overworld. It's just, you know, there's a ton of stuff down there, but I didn't really want to spend that much time down there. I know there are depths fans out there, but I wasn't really one of them. I love that game on the whole, but I, it didn't, I guess, deliver that same kind of boundary

breaking feeling just because breath came first. And obviously, this was building on the foundation of this, like, totally paradigm changing game, not just for this franchise, but all of gaming in some ways. And, you know, it made some major strides. And obviously, like, all of the ways that you can manipulate the physics in that game are really impressive and original. But, yeah, on the whole, I think I'd probably say that I prefer it. And yet, maybe just don't have the same warm feelings that I had about breath just because it came first. Yeah.

But to me, seeing, I think, a lot of people clearly just not agree. with me on tears and actually, you know, talk about it the way they talk about it. It's like when I first saw, when we first started to see what Echoes was going to shape up to be, I kind of had this thought in the back of my mind of like, almost like what you said

about the Princess Peach game, right? Of like, did Breath of the Wild, have Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom kind of created a sense of massive scope for Zelda that now this game is going to

feel a little trivial, right? Like this top down, is it going to feel kind of like you said about the peach thing, like a lesser spin-off? Is it really going to feel like a proper, you know, it's like, okay, you can play a Zelda, but is it going to feel kind of like a footnote in terms of the history of Zelda on the switch? And I was pleasantly surprised then when I load this game and I'm like, no, this feels substantial. Like that, I think that's one thing I have to to the echoes credit, right? This game feels substantial. And when I called it like a killer app

at the top of the pod, it's like they, the echoes, like just that basic idea. Like forget everything else. Forget the progression. Like the stuff you can do with the echoes, the way that it kind of takes

that boundlessness about Breath of the Wild, right, which is a game that has a massive scope and you can kind of explore it at your leisure however you want. You can, you know, I don't even know if it makes sense to talk about sequence breaking in Breath of the Wild because the game is just like what sequence. The game doesn't even care. The game expects you to just get wherever you want to get by brute force and it's fine. And the fact that Echoes also makes me feel that despite having a smaller scope.

Like I feel this sense of, no, this game also can take whatever I throw at it. Right. This game actually does just want me to do whatever I want to like the bed meta in this, this game. game is crazy, right? Like, you can use beds. You can just, beds on beds on beds. And next thing you know, you are on top of wherever you thought you could not be in this game. Yeah.

And there's a playfulness. Nintendo has referred to it as a mischievousness with this game where, yes, the fact that you're using beds to traverse so much of the world or getting inside the pots and sneaking around solid snake style is, it's really. ridiculous in a way that I think just speaks to this as like, you know, it's a play world. Like, they're just giving you the tools and here's this space and go wild. So, yes, I'm looking, I have my switch in my hands right now and I'm looking at the most used echoes.

So just to back up a bit, if anyone hasn't called the core mechanic of this game, you play as Zelda, Link is taken off the board, he's captured, and you play as Zelda who at least initially doesn't have the sword play that Link does. What she has is the tri-rod, which is this magical tool that allows us to duplicate many, many items within the game world. Enemies, physical objects, there are more than 120 of them, and you can deploy them however you'd like. And you're constrained somewhat in the number of echoes you can use, and you can upgrade that as the game goes on, and it gets more permissive, and you can use more and more items. But looking at my most used item, and again, I have finished the game. I've gotten, I think, 120 of 127 echoes, something like that.

My most used item is old bed. Old bed. And it's like the first item you get. It's the first item you get in the game. And it's a staple. It's a mainstay for the rest of the way. Now, you get better beds as the game goes on. You get multiple models of bed.

But old bed, I used to get across so many gaps and to climb on top of things. it's like the puzzles in this game, and this was true to some extent about Breath of the Wild, but it's not just your standard dungeon, find the small key, find the map, find the big key, the boss key,

right? There's plenty of that too. But it's also like, how do I get from point A to point B? How do I climb up on this thing? And what sort of edifice do I assemble here so that I can get that thing? And there are many,

many ways that you can do that, but I kept coming back to old bit, just no matter what happened, which in a way, you know, we could talk about that might be one minor nitpick I would have about this game is that there's this vast array of echo options. And yet I still defaulted to several that I kept in heavy rotation. Yeah, there's like five that are just clutch in almost every situation they could possibly generate. Yeah. Yeah.

But what you're saying about this, you know, there's no compromise. There's no like, yeah, hey, we're giving Zelda a game. and it's just going to be a demo for what that would be like or some watered down Legend of Zelda experience. No, not at all. This is every bit a Legend of Zelda game, all the hallmarks of that that you'd expect. And it's bigger than I thought.

I messaged you when I started the game to say, well, it doesn't seem like it's going to be that long because we were kind of figuring about the timeline for playing and recording. It's a pretty big game. It's long. There are several dungeons. The map, like if you've played,

the Link's Awakening remake, you know, that was based on a Game Boy game, and this map apparently is eight times the size of that one. So it's not like Tears of the Kingdom big, but for a 2D top-down Zelda, it's quite large. And there's, there's a lot to it. And the geographical diversity and all the different ecosystems and characters, that is all very much here. So it's kind of like linked to the past style map, but even more, but built on top of that, too. So, there's just a lot of stuff to do and collect and find in this game. And my only thought on the kind of breath of the wildness of this game is that there are times when it feels like elements of those bigger games are kind of grafted onto this one in a way where they feel unnecessary. It's not bad, but it's just I didn't find myself utilizing them that much.

Give me an example. Give me an example. Okay. So, for example, there's some sort of like vestigial element. to this that, you know, it's like an appendix. It's like we had this leftover from breath or tears. Like, for example, there are a bunch of upgradable accessories that you can equip to, say, swim faster or climb faster.

And there are, there's a smoothie system. So you don't cook, but you make smoothies, right? Yeah. I made a lot of smoothies in this game. I got through Breath of the Wild without cooking anything somehow. And then tears, I got more into the cooking. Just like, unlike in real life, I was. cooking pretty heavily in tears. But in this game, like, there are abilities that you can enhance

with the smoothies or with the accessories, you know, like certain smoothies will enable you to glow or resist lightning or, you know, various other abilities that in Breath of the Wild, let's say, or Tears the Kingdom, that's very valuable. But here, it just feels sort of extraneous to me. I didn't really need those upgrades. There aren't really a lot of places you can't go without them. So those kind of felt to me like there are some systems here that I didn't really rely on that just, you know, sort of signaled, okay, we're taking over some ideas from those other games, but they're not as essential here. I, okay, I mechanically get what you're saying, but I actually want to use your point about smoothies to tap back into something you said a few minutes ago about mischievous. Like the mischievous quality of this game, which I think ends up being like a huge part of why. it's so effective, especially as a kind of the rare opportunity to play as Zelda, right?

Because it's like, I feel like all players are going to sooner or later in their play through have this experience where you're in a fight with some number of creatures and you're just trolling them. You're just like infinitely spawning a chain of whatever the name of the echo that is the flying one that spits bombs, right? There are a few bomb echoes, but like you're just doing this chain of like, they're bombs everywhere and then you're going to take a hit and you're just going to have like 10 bombs on screen. You're going to build an old bed. Zelda's going to jump in it and take a nap in the

middle of this like chaos. And you know, she was previously like making smoothies. Like there's something about the just the tone of this game. They made Zelda like a troll sorcerer who's into smoothies. Like that's that's it. That's it. That's it. that's the killer at. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, I get,

so I get what you're saying mechanically about how it feels like it kind of, I guess we're doing the cooking mechanic, but kind of watered down. But man, if I don't love that, like, the first time they tell you like, oh,

you know, what is it? Like, you're, isn't it like a bunch of parched gerudo? And they're like, yeah, if you could go make a smoothie to like cheer these guys.

Yeah. Cheer these women. I'm just like, what is this? Like, I think totally, they just like nail a lot of stuff about, like, Zelda ends up feeling like a very distinct character in a really nice way. Yeah. Certainly the game has a character. I mean, Zelda, like Link is kind of a blink slate.

I mean, there's, you know, people reacting to you. There's no dialogue, et cetera. But the game and the world definitely has a character. And there's a lot of extremely silly stuff that's happening. Or the Clark Kent. She's doing the Clark. We're just like, people are like, who are you in a line? You don't see, because they have the wanted posters for all over the game, and no one recognizes her because she has a lid on.

Like that's insane. Yeah. It's funny because the game starts as a lot of Zelda games do. It gives you a taste of a fully powered character, right? And you play as link in the initial sequence. This isn't really a spoiler. It's the very first thing you do and was mentioned in trailers and gameplay previews. But you play as link with the 20 pieces of.

of hard or 20 hard containers and, you know, all the abilities. And then they take that away from you, of course. That's always the tantalizing, teasing aspect of the beginning of these games. And then, of course, you switched to Zelda. I was thinking to myself, imagine if they had somehow managed to keep that switch under wraps. If they didn't advertise this as, hey, it's the first Zelda game. They just said, there's a new legend Zelda game. And maybe they show you the beginning.

And then can you imagine how that would have broken the internet, broken the gaming world, if that had been a secret reveal? Well, you know, it's hard to keep anything secret and you mentioned leaks. This game leaked too, right? But, like, that would have been a big, like, remember where you were moment. Yeah. If you were playing this game and suddenly you're controlling Zelda without having any foreknowledge of that, I almost wish that that had been kept quiet somehow.

It would have been hard to advertise the game without, like, showing Zelda gameplay. But still, I wish. Just a surprise shop of a Zelda game. Yeah. But, well, I mean, yeah, it was only announced a few months before it came out, which is a pretty short timeline as these things go. But it's interesting because there is that tension, I think, between taking the classic Zelda gameplay,

which is Link gameplay, and porting it into this Zelda world. And again, I'm reading that dialogue among the Nintendo developers in Onuma and Tomomi Sano, who is the director of the game on the Nintendo side, not the Grezo side. She's the first female director to have worked on this series appropriately.

And they were talking about how it didn't start as a Zelda game. It wasn't like they started out like, okay, we've heard your cries and requests internet. We will make a Zelda game. No, of course not. They started out making another standard Zelda game. And then they realized midway through, actually, this would work better with Zelda.

And the way it started was they were going to make kind of a Mario Maker style Zelda game, which is something that a lot of people have wanted, like, you know, a Zelda maker where you're editing and designing your own dungeons. And then they realized, well, what if we just kind of gave you the ability to direct stuff as you play a more standard sort of adventure. But the problem they ran into was, well, if you're a link

and you have the sword and the shield, then why would you need the echoes? Or how would you juggle all of those things? And so they realized maybe we just take link out of the picture, at least for most of the game, and make it Zelda-centric. And then there's kind of a balance between, like, is it as satisfying to summon the echoes

as it is to just jump around and block stuff and swing stuff, right? And there's a constant interplay between those two because you do get the ability, and it's a timed ability, to essentially summon Link's abilities, right? As Zelda, you can hop around and you can swing your sword and you can shoot a bow, et cetera. It's just that you have a meter that runs out. And there's a constant, like, well, do I want to attack this in the Link style way or do I want to attack this in the Zelda style way? Did you find one more or less satisfying? or were you thinking like,

I don't need this link style gameplay anymore? Like, they shouldn't even have hedged and provided that. Or were you thinking, like, this is, link is OP in this game? Like, there's too much link derived powers. I don't want to backseat drive. I can't go so far as to say they shouldn't have included the sword and bow gameplay. But I personally find it gratuitous. it's also weird, right? It's like, think about it. The sword, like that mode, right, where you get the link style move set. Um, it's kind of treated like a power up state, right? It is. It is treated like a power up state. I was going to say, is this game sort of sexist. It's like, well, it's Zelda's original adventure, right? And yet I was thinking like at the beginning, like, you know, Link is stronger and he's faster and he jumps higher and then you're Zelda. And at first it's kind of deflating. It's like, oh, I can't do any of those things.

And then, like, if you do the transformation into Link's powers, it plays this heroic little musical cue. It's like, all the heroes here, you know? So there's part of me where I'm thinking, like, this is Zelda's game. You know, it's not like Mando and Grogu taking over the Book of Boobovet or anything. And it's like, hey, this is their series. Why are you hogging the spotlight here? But there's an element of like, you know, we want to make a Zelda game.

But also, it can't be bereft of Link entirely. Like, there's still a lot of relics of Link and Link is around. And he's the hero and he plays a role in this story too. But my point is just the like it's treated like a power upstate. And I actually almost always think of it is a kind of a nerve or buzzkill using that power up state. Because it's just, again, there are moments obviously when it's useful when you need just to get like raw damage out in quick succession on like a weak point or something like that. But I guess what I mean with it is that the echoes, because it one, just feels like a clever mechanic, right? that like you

you can just spawn copies of things. And honestly, like you can just develop preferences. Like there's no right echo to spawn for a situation in a lot of cases. You can use whatever you want, whatever kind of suits your play style. And so that feels like an interesting mechanic with a lot of options, whereas the supposed power up state feels very kind of one note.

It feels very like suddenly you're just mashing buttons and getting damage out. Yeah. And so I think that's what kind of, bug. And also, I don't like the resource management. I don't like the blue meter. And I don't know. I'm not saying I would redesign it necessarily. I just know that it feels for a power up state kind of underwhelming and just feels weirdly not nearly as interesting to be in as the default Zelda state where you just, the world is your oyster and you can spawn whatever you want and figure out how you want to engage with like a mob or bosses in creative ways.

Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of a blunt tool. You're doing all this creative stuff. And then it's like, I'm going to go back to swing my sword. But also, sometimes that's what you want to do because it can be more effective depending on the enemy. If you just want to bypass the creative approach and just take some chunks out of someone's

health, then that can be a simpler way to do it at times. And yeah, it does feel like it's kind of, you know, sometimes caught in between the traditional and the new or doing something entirely original. And I did feel like you mentioned the beds. And I love the fact that you can use the beds like that. In some ways, the freedom that this game gives you makes it easier from a pure just like, will I live? Can I survive this fight, right? Because there's really never any tension in terms of. Just taking that.

Yeah, like, I don't know that I ever died during this game. I mean, for one thing, you know, you can get your fairies in your bottles and they can revive you. But I rarely even got to that point because the resources are so plentiful. If you want to blend your smoothies, you can have a full complement of smoothies at all times. And they can be buffing you and also restoring all your hearts. And then you can warp whenever pretty much, right? Like you can warp from a dungeon, you know, unless you're in the middle of a boss fight or something. you can go wherever you want in the world, which is nice.

I appreciate that convenience, but also I can just go to the smoothie store. I can go somewhere and get some health. Or, yeah, you can just set up your bed. There are times when I slept through boss fights, basically. Yeah, there's one boss that spawns a bed for you. Literally, he spawns a bed of like random objects, and it's like a bunch of random objects and one of them is a bed. If you're having a hard time in that boss fight, it's just...

The beds restore your hearts if you just sit there. they're undisturbed. And so you can just deploy some some monsters to take the fight to the bus for you while you're just over there chilling in the corner with your heart. It's so good. Every time you sleep during like a chaotic encounter, it is so iconic. It's very relatable as someone who likes to nap, you know, just do that in the middle of everything. But it does take that sense of difficulty.

There is actually, there's like a hero mode or something, right? There's a harder difficulty level, which is kind of. of unusual for his Zelda game. And I think that's because... They had that, what is it, master? Yeah, all that stuff. Right. Yeah, there could be like a new game plus sort of thing.

But there's, you know, more of a like monsters are more powerful. You have less health kind of thing if you want that. Because the standard game doesn't really give you that much of that. And that's okay. Because for me, it was more about the creativity and the puzzle solving than just, can I survive? Can I beat this monster without losing all my life? But there are times when that freedom.

So according to the developers, They said, Aounma said, there were three rules. Be able to paste things however, whenever, and whenever you like, make it possible to complete puzzles using things that aren't there. And third, being able to find uses for echoes that are so ingenious, it almost feels like cheating should be part of what makes this game fun. Now, I didn't have that feeling as often as I did in Breath of Wild, or especially tears, where you're crafting all of these machines and vehicles and sometimes bypassing stuff entirely.

did you get that feeling often when you're playing echoes? Because obviously, like, the possibilities are more limited in this two-d top-down space. Yeah. But there's nothing. A lot of freedom. There's, you're right, though, that there's nothing like, if you think about Breath of the Wild, like, Rivali's Gale breaks the entire game. Like, you know what I mean?

It's like Rivali's Gale, all the loving design they did to make obstacles for, like, 80, really, it's like 95% of the towers, totally. just totally made irrelevant once you get a Rivali's gale. You just bypass every single power obstacle in the game unless it's one of the underground solutions, right? I don't think this game has anything that extreme. Because I do feel like, yeah, those open world Zelda games have a bit of that going on

where it's like because the scope is so big, that kind of mandate for mischievousness. Like when you break stuff in those games, it really feels like breaking it where you're right. Yeah. Because it's this top down, it feels like the ceiling. I guess that is an intended fun, right?

Yeah, the ceiling for breakage is a little lower than for sure. Yeah. And also, I think the fact that I appreciated the sword fighting sometimes, because you are summoning these monsters, obviously the AI is pretty simplistic. Yeah. Both the enemies and your allies when you summon them. And so there's a part of it where it feels almost Pikmin-coded

or kind of RTS style where you're summoning these creatures and then you're just off on the side, letting them do your dirty work and not really taking that active a role in the proceedings. You can target certain enemies and kind of direct them and tell them where to go. But also sometimes it's just waiting for your moblin to throw a spear at the right thing for a while

or getting stuck on a rock or something where I felt a little disconnected from the combat and you are literally disconnected from it. And so there were times when I kind of appreciated the ability to just go in sword swinging because you do feel like you're sitting on the sidelines or you're a bystander at times. And it can be great if you feel clever and you craft and you summon, oh, this monster is the perfect one to summon here for this one to go against that one. The weaknesses and the strengths will be complementary. And so you can just tailor it specifically to the situation. And if there's thinking involved there, then that's great.

but also you get into the game a bit. And again, I'm looking at my most common summons. And most of them are environmental obstacle traversal type things like the old bed. The water block. If you've got the water block, water block. Once you do that, you can kind of go anywhere. You can just create these water blocks that will allow you to go vertically side to side. The platform is another of my most common ones.

It's this platform that rises and descends with an eye on the front. And you can kind of put that anywhere and go vertical or the trampoline. and, you know, ones that are monsters that fight for you, but also do stuff in the world, like the ignozole, if that's how you say it, that creates fire and so you can light torches and that sort of thing. But once you get, like, the sword moblin level two or three or something, I was kind of just like spamming sword moblin from that point forward, because it's kind of like overpowered, like whatever the situation is,

I'm just going to go for these go-toes. So that's, you know, a lot of the 127 or whatever it is, echoes feel like you could have cut down that list and they're there either to sort of like fan servicey like, oh, I remember that from that game or it just kind of duplicates the functionality of something else. And then it's just personal preference. It gives you options. Yeah. I'd be curious to see like other people's most used echoes. How uniform would that be? Do other people develop their personal favorites? Like, I might be missing out. I'm sure there are people who play this game multiple times and do different play styles. And I might not even realize some strategy that

actually would have worked really well when I was just building beds instead. Do you use the Armadillo? I forget what it's actually called. But do you use the level two armadillo? I use that when I really want to troll. And it's just to create a pinball machine. Especially if it's like a closed arena. Yeah. And yeah, that that's fun. Yeah. That was that was good too. And look, I don't know how long it took me to finish this campaign at 20 hours or more, maybe. Probably an hour or two of that was just scrolling through echoes to find the one I wanted. So there is an inventory management issue. And I don't know how that could have been better.

It's just inherently tough because if you have 120 plus of these things, you can either open up the full menu and scroll through and find the one you want or there are several. You can just pull it up with the D-pad as you play. And you can sort it differently. So you can sort it by the resources it takes to summon something or the last one you learned or your most used or your last used. There are various different ways to get to the ones you want quicker. It might have helped if they had cut the clutter.

There are certain objects that you use once to solve a puzzle or complete a side quest. And then you really don't need them anymore, but they stay in your inventory alongside all the other more commonly used echoes. You can also upgrade some echoes. But when you get a level two or level three version of one, the weaker version is still selectable, and I never use those anymore. So maybe it would have been better

if those had been replaced. But that's, I think, another reason why I didn't really explore the studio space here, and I'm just kind of going back to the same ones over and over again, because it was a hassle to have to find something. So if there's, like, a fire enemy or an ice enemy and I want to develop the contrasting thing,

then I'm going to go to the one that I used last instead of scrolling through to find the one that's going to take me 30 seconds to get to. No, you got to open. your mind, man. Because you're right. It is the game. It is easy to kind of end up limiting yourself to just like what works reliably.

But yeah, there are times where I do find myself actually trying to like scroll through the menu and look at the stuff that I just don't even remember picking them in the first place and being like, wait, what does this do? And then just kind of throwing it out and see what happens. Yeah. There were occasional times even later in the game where I'd have to do some specific thing and maybe there would be a hint. And then I'd vaguely remember,

oh, yeah, I got that thing four dungeons ago. I bet that would be helpful here. So when that happened, that was really cool when I had those Eureka moments, but that didn't happen as much as I would have liked, I think. And maybe that's on me for not being creative enough, but I guess the game doesn't force you to be creative.

It doesn't force you to do anything. It's all about the freedom, which was another thing that Anuma said, I used to believe that the theory behind games was that being set loose, from restraints gave a feeling of freedom and growth. That's why old games were designed to slowly lift the restrictions that were there at the start. For a long time, game developers like ourselves have made games while firmly believing this theory to be right, and we felt safe creating

restrictions in line with it. However, the Echoes gameplay could fly in the face of this theory at times. When you're actually playing, it can be more fun not having the restrictions in the first place. And so we asked ourselves, what do we want to do about this one? Shall we remove it? And then gradually began removing those restrictions. Over time, most of the restrictions we thought were at the starter development, we're no longer needed. It even led us to allow things that we were worried at first would provide too much freedom. So there were times, there was a water temple, for example, where I sort of just skipped a good deal of the dungeon because I could go in a bunch of rooms and activate a bunch of stuff

to have the water flood to get up to a certain point, or I could just use water boxes to just go up there myself. And I kind of, I'm not sure whether that was intended or not. I felt like a speed runner finding an exploit, but I guess there's a certain amount of like, well, let's just let them find their own path through this thing and everyone will come up with their own way.

And to your point about that quote, like the boss of that area, we're not going to full spoilers, I guess, but the boss of that area, like in retrospect, I genuinely don't know what the, what the intended way to damage him is, right? Like I found like six different ways to do it.

outside of like obviously the sword mode. I think I just was running low on the sort of blue meter at that point. And I just like because of the nature of how the fight like progresses and transforms and the environment transforms, it did. At first I felt the sense of like, no, there's got to be a specific echo I'm meant to be using here to do this. And then I sort of just like backed off and it's like, well, no, just treat this like every other moment of the game so far where it's like, it just throw stuff out and see what's. the most effective at getting sort of DPS out.

And I think I ended up using a combination of the, what is it? The bio, the piranha plant, basically, the one that can work underwater. And then depending on the angle of the weak spot, I would throw out bomb fishes and stuff like that. But yeah, it really did feel not just like I was kind of jerry-ringing the answer to something that had a proper solution I wasn't using. But rather like, there is no proper solution. just do what you got to do using this menu of at this point,

at that point I think I had like 60 just you know, just throw something out there and see what works out there. Like that felt good. There are times, yeah, I beat a boss or I completed dungeon and I was like, did I do that right? Was that like a half-assed way to do that?

Like would the developers be proud of me for figuring that out? Was that a loophole or what? And yeah, you just have to free your mind, I guess, and be flexible and whatever gets you there. Would Nintendo be proud of me? It's probably, basically, as I'm playing this game.

But it's tough to tell. Now, I think this is, I think there have been more Zelda games released for Switch than any other Nintendo system. I don't think there's ever been a Nintendo system with three exclusive mainline Zelda games to have come out for it. And this is the third for the Switch. And that's not even counting the Links Awakening remake or the Skyward Sword remaster. And that's a sign, I guess, of how productive Nintendo has been, you know, building Breath of the Wild and then iterating on it using that as the foundation for tiers and then having this separate team and this separate studio working in parallel with this game.

But that also speaks to the longevity of the switch, the fact that we're still waiting for the official Switch to reveal as we speak here. But that also does take a toll on the game from a performance standpoint. And it was a little jarring to go from Astrobot to Echoes where obviously the ambitions technologically are not the same in terms of graphical horsepower and resolution and everything. But this game is chugging, you know? Like whether you play in docked mode or handheld mode, I did a bit of both. But like the Link's Awakening game, there are pretty frequent frame rate slowdowns in a way that's kind of distracting.

You know, it's got that like Shogun style. depth of field, bouquet effect on the bottom of each screen that you're on. And then as you go in the overworld from one screen to another, it'll slow down and then it'll speed up again and slow down again.

And that can be a bit distracting. It's not that big an issue because gameplay is still supreme and obviously Nintendo knows that. And if they give you a satisfying gameplay, then they're not going to try to compete with Microsoft and Sony on just having it be higher res.

But that was notable, right? Like even a Nintendo co-developed game switches is struggling at this point, even to make this kind of simplified cartoon-y look run smoothly. Yeah. No, I feel you. But again, they have a killer app. Like to your point about the Nintendo difference, the difference in the value proposition between Nintendo versus Sony and Microsoft.

It's like, yeah, but they got a killer app. Like, I never, it's funny because like, if I think of games where I know people, like, for instance, Shemagami Tensei 5, like, they, the Atlas put out like vengeance. And I remember the original release on the Switch, like, because it was a Switch exclusive, I know a ton of people in the Megaton community for like a long time complained about the performance of that game.

And it's not that I didn't perceive what they were saying about frame drops or whatever, but it's just like the Switch, it's like the games that come out on the Switch, the sort of niftiness of the Switch itself, have this way of making me not care. The same way I would care if, my PS5 is like dropping frames or lagging or something.

Yeah, the switch is magic. I don't know what to tell you. The other aspect, it's not built to be eye candy. This game looks good. And I think the look of this will hold up, much like Wind Waker does, much like the sort of 16-bit era of Zelda games do. But it's not meant to blow you away with the frame rate

or the 4K or anything else. But it is really impressive from a performance standpoint, just in the sense that they've built this sandbox that doesn't break. And that, I think, technically, is super impressive. Even if it's not like the character models or like super high poly or whatever, it's like, how does this game work so well? And this and breath and tears, how many games do we see that are just buggy and broken and you think like, oh, there's promise here, but it's just not polished or like it doesn't

work the way it's supposed to? And then you take these games and there. There's so much freedom that they're giving to the player. Here are all these things. You can summon anything you want at any time. And yet never did I have a moment where, I mean, my game never crashed, not once, right? I never had a moment where I boxed myself into a corner. Like I did something that I couldn't get out of and had to restart or reload or anything like that.

There's so much freedom. And yet at no point did I find it frustrating or like they failed to kind of, you know, implement their vision here. Like, it just works. And I don't know whether that is a product of, obviously, like, the talent and experience on the teams that work on Zelda games or just the time and effort that they put into testing these things or what. But it's like, how do these games work so well when so many other games that are no more ambitious

break? And yet a Nintendo game, it's like the old school like Nintendo seal of quality, you know? It's just kind of, that's not always the case. I mean, if you're playing some game freak like Pokemon game, it might be kind of unplayable at times, which is why Powell World is so popular. It's like we built a better mass trap or Pokemon trap. But with these games, that just constantly amazes me, I guess,

that they really make it not such a curated experience where, okay, we know how everyone's going to solve this puzzle, and we can plan for that. And yet the chaos that occurs is like a good kind of chaos. It's not a game-breaking chaos. And I don't know what the secret sauce or the math, magic is there, but it's unique. I swear in the early game, I had a point actually in a dungeon where I could have sworn I

softlocked myself. And I was like, oh, see, this is the problem with all this freedom. It's just you're creating this opportunity for players to do. And then I realized after looking at what I was doing for best, I was like, oh, I'm just being stupid. Here's one way I can get out. And it's like, man, like, and part of it was like when I got to that part where I thought I softlocked myself, I was so convinced that I actually kind of doubled down.

I was like, no, let me see if I can. can create like a situation where I like prove that this philosophy of designing these games with this degree of freedom is actually misguided. And I couldn't do it. You know, even even with malevolence, even trying to be a black hat, you know, I just could not. I was like, no, they, they thought of this. They thought of this. Yeah. Yeah. I do think the one area in which these games suffer somewhat because of that freedom is the dungeon design. I find that it's a little more forgettable, you know, in the way that like early Zelda games, some of those dungeons will stick with me forever for better or worse and, you know, kind of tortured me. And maybe that's

because I was 12 when I was playing them. Maybe I'm better at games now, you know, like maybe they wouldn't have told me. Hopefully you're better at games. Hopefully. Yeah. At least like mentally, when it comes to solving tricks, if not in terms of reaction time. But I feel like the dungeons are a little more interchangeable in this game and also in breath and tears.

I mean, those games de-emphasized dungeons to some extent, and you had shrines and everything, but I think people kind of craved more dedicated dungeons. And you get, what, at least like seven in this game, and they're kind of themed

in the sense that, you know, you have a fire one and a water one or whatever, but they're not in the way that old school Zelda was where there's only one way to solve these puzzles. You have to use a certain tool or ability that you earned in that dungeon to beat that dungeon. Part of it is that these games are less linear. So you can go in various orders, right? Like you have a choice when this game starts, much like Breath of Wilder tiers, like you have this big map and here's an area of interest and here's something to check out and you can go this way or that way first. And it might nudge you

in one direction first. But you don't know the sequence exactly. You don't know how high-powered your Zelda's going to be by the time you get there. And you don't know how you're going to solve this thing. And so I do think that makes the dungeons a little less distinctive just because they're not able to really craft them with certain solutions in mind. Did you have that complaint? Or are you just kind of like, yeah, I'll just figure my own way through these things.

And that's fine. I wasn't stumped that often. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, I agree with you in general. Right. I would make a distinction between, for instance, shrines and Breath of the Wild and this. I don't know that I agree that those felt generic. I do think that like-

Yeah, those were specific. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think that this game may be more, I'm more on the same page as you, where it's like, because you really can do anything and you can end up manipulating the environment, you just have so many options for doing stuff. It does create the sense of like, you can use so much brute force. to solve things.

And a lot of the solutions work across lots of different, like, environments that I agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the fun of the exploration. The specificity of the challenges. Yeah. The exploration and figuring out how to go places and where.

And it's not quite as much fun to run around a 2D top down world, maybe as Breath of the Wilder or Tears the Kingdom, which were just so expansive and felt so big. We should mention, like, it's not purely 2D top down. There are also side-scrolling sequences, like in Zelda 2 or the Link's Awakening remake, which kind of reframe things in an interesting way, where some of the summons work differently when you're side-scrolling as opposed to top-down, and you get a better sense of their dimensions or abilities, and you can deploy them in different ways. And there's also this still world.

So the animating feature of this game is that there is a big bad, and there are rifts being created all over Hyrule and people are getting frozen in this still world, it's called. So that's a hallmark of somebody's Ella games, you know, your dark world, your depths, whatever. There's some alternate reality you can go to. And in that reality, this game almost becomes a platformer, really, because you're trying to unrift these rifts and free the people who are trapped in them and you have to create, you know, track down the tries friends who can kind of make the rifts go away. And to do that, you basically are platforming, more or less.

Like I almost wanted to see Grezo make a Mario game or something because it then becomes explicitly about how do I find this thing? How do I get from here to there? And, you know, that gets a little repetitive and formulaic maybe as you get on in the game and that doesn't really evolve all that much. But there is some variety in the way you're kind of interacting with this world. Yeah. I agree with all that.

I think one question I have going to be. forward, is there a point at which this freedom itself becomes kind of wrote? Like, this is what a Zelda game is. Now, they give you all these tools, you figure out how to go forward, to the point that a retro throwback, actually, let's put this more on rails and linear, and it'll be just really kind of like brain busting puzzles. Because I did miss that, just that sense that there are so many ways I can solve this, that I was never banging my head against the wall, as frustrating as that could be, if you're remembering the water temple from Ocarino

or whatever legendarily difficult dungeon, the sense of satisfaction you get when you solve that puzzle and you realize like the devious design at work here and oh, here's how they wanted me to do this. I figured it out. I beat you at your own game. That could be really satisfying. And I just didn't have those breakthrough moments as much.

So I wonder if after we've gotten several installments of this style of Zelda, I'm not someone who thinks games have to be hard to be fun or anything. I'm not saying, like, bring back the challenge. But also, I would kind of like that handcrafted, finely designed, and curated model of Zelda at some point again in the future. You know, I'd kind of like to play a dungeon where there's only one way to beat it. And it's tough to figure out what that way is. So I wonder at some point whether, like, okay, we got stuck in a rut with that kind of Zelda game.

Now we're freeing our minds and widening our horizons. But then at some point, do we crave or just Nintendo say, actually, like, the freshest feeling thing we could do here is to rewind and go back to the way these things used to work, at least for one game. Yeah, time is a flat circle, Ben. You will get your wish. I can tell. I can see, you know, like. Do you think that we are essentially starting a second branch to the franchise here where, okay, you have your mainline link adventures, and then you have your more top-down 2D-style Zelle? or would you expect, okay, we'll get to play a Zelda in a future open world game? Or like,

will these things, these two branching paths just continue to move forward in parallel? Or will this be a one-off where it's not like, okay, here's a proof of concept. Let's iterate on this design. But this is that one game where you could do echoes. Like is this now, okay, Breath of Wild Tears of the Kingdom, that's the new model for 3D open world Zelda. And here we have a new model for a new model for future 2D installments. Well, if anything, I was going to ask you kind of like about I guess the future in that sense, but the contrast

between Link and Zelda's playable characters, but also between like the open world versus the top down. Like, I can't tell in the long run, right? In the long run of Zelda, how much Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom

are going to be aberrations and are going to be kind of generational statements, right? They're going to be kind of what Zelda did in this stretch of like big open world video games as kind of like historical trend, right? Like I don't know whether to expect, and I'm curious what you think about it, whether to expect another tiers like game, right? Or whether this like echoes is something like a reversion to a mean, right?

of saying that like, yeah, you know, the Switch era, Zelda's like, were clearly dominated by this big, um, productive open world experiment. But, and maybe this is also me not knowing what the future of open world games is because if I think about like all of the goodwill for tears in the kingdom and for breath of the wild, it's in, in, in contrast with all of the ill will for like, that people seem to have for like, far. cry and horizon, right? So it's like, some of this is questions about the future of Zelda.

Some of this is questions about just the future of like single player video games and sort of the trends of like our generation. Yeah. I think they've said something to the effect of that they're continuing to build on this open world framework that they're not doing a direct sequel to tiers, but that that's kind of the new model for that brand of Zelda game. And so I think we will continue to see that. It's just, there are these paradigm shifts in Zelda, which because of how accomplished that series has also often been influential on all of gaming. So you have the first original legend of Zelda and then you have linked to the past and then of course you have O'Koreen of Time and then you have Breath of the Wild and these games are like, okay, here's the

model that we're going to be building on for the next 40 years. Here's kind of when we decide what a traditional Zelda game is going to look like and fully refine that. Here's when we go from 2D to 3D. Here's when we go from 3D to open world 3D. And I don't know what the next leap is, whether it's a technological one or a conceptual one. I like that they're still trying to innovate, that they're still trying to give us something new every time out.

And whether it's this copy and paste Echo's feature or it's Zelda being playable, you know you're not getting something that you have played before and this far into a franchise where there would be a tendency to be complacent. I think that's pretty admirable. And I think it's good to get new blood making this series, too. Even if everyone at Grezo has been playing Zelda their whole lives and obviously loves the series

and has learned from it and is doing constant nods to it, just the continuity has been a strength, I think, for this franchise that you have people involved, even decades on who've been involved from the start, but also shake things up a little and, you know, broaden the definition of what a Zelda game can be. And sometimes someone comes into the franchise through one of these development partners and then take center stage, like the director of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Fujibiyashi. He first worked on the Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages games, which I loved, which were developed by a Capcom subsidiary. And then he joined Nintendo and became

kind of a star. So I hope that there are these parallel tracks, these spirit tracks, if you will, of Zelda, open world, Zelda, not open world. And that we can keep getting that just the way that, you know, you get Super Mario Wonder and you also get Odyssey style games or Galaxy style games. I think they can encompass more than one style. Clearly, it's a pretty malleable, flexible format, you know, as sort of all the hallmarks of the traditional Zelda progression are here, and yet they keep kind of redefining what that can mean and how they can play in 2024.

And I love that for them, and I love that for us, the fact that I can still be extremely excited when a new Zelda game comes out, not just because I know this is going to remind me of everything I've played, before and it's going to give me those warm fuzzy feelings, but also it's going to push that format forward. Speaking of that, by the way, I meant to mention the music in this game is fantastic. And that's often a strength of Zelda, but it's not just remixes of famous Zelda themes, so there's a lot of that too, but also just really great, distinctive new themes and themed music for different parts of the world that were like totally stuck in my head. Like I would listen to the

soundtrack for this game when I'm not playing. I think it's maybe one of the best or most memorable Zelda soundtracks that I can remember in any recent release. I was going to say, actually, it was one of the main things I was thinking about immediately before I came into this, or at least with the last bit of play I did with the game before coming into this taping, I found myself thinking about the music. And I think thinking specifically about how it's almost like these games are composed by, like a psychiatrist.

Like, there's something about how when you sit with the volume on on a switch playing a Zelda game, it's almost like a spell is being cast over you musically. Like, I really like that.

There are plenty of video. I mean, I love video game music, right? And there are plenty of video games where I love the vibe, right? Like, Final Fantasy soundtracks, persona,

whatever. But, like, I think Zelda, more than any other franchise I can think of, it feels like this soundtracks are really, just like seductive isn't quite the right word

but they're they have this way of really putting you at ease while playing and I say that it's somebody who is otherwise the classic kind of gamer who's all about like getting frustrated on purpose like I'm the picture of somebody getting mad while playing Mario Kart because I got blue-shelled and like screaming about it yeah and Zelda is like the one franchise where you reliably and again like you said it's like So much of it is the music. So much of it is the sound design where it's just like, I actually do in fact feel quite relaxed and looks playing this game.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, is the new Zelda game good? Yes, it is good. Yes, Arjuna. Yes, anyone else who had that question. And maybe great. I would go so far as to say, great.

I don't know that if you, you know, we're constructing a pantheon of Zelda games, that's obviously pretty crowded. but it's up there, you know? It compares quite favorably, certainly to any games of this type. I am curious. I'd love to hear from some people

who are playing this coming from breath and tears and whether they feel like the fact that the scope isn't quite as big or the freedom isn't quite as expansive. Does it feel like a step back or a step down or deflating in any way or kind of a cover version of some of those games? Because there were moments when I had that feeling,

but overall, I just really did not. It just, it feels like a legitimate standalone game on its own right that's like clearly aware of all of the history of this franchise, but also is still finding new ways to do things and indulge that desire for creativity. So it's a really good game. I think people should play it and let us know how they feel about it. Any other closing thoughts about Echoes of Wisdom before we wrap this thing up?

No, I think we got into it. Like, this is, this is, I'm happy that we actually had time to like really grapple with the game, you know, in advance in this case. And yeah, I look forward to, you know, people listening to this pod. I look forward to hearing what, what people think. Mm-hmm. I had a great time with it. Me too. Yeah.

I'm trying to dig deep for any other nitpicks I might have had. I think a lot of times, like the smoothies kind of break the game's economy in a way just because there's, there's so many smoothie ingredients in this. smoothies are pretty powerful and cheap. And I had way more rupees than I needed in this game most of the time. And you do a lot of the side quests and some of them just give you like 20 rupees or something. It's like, I did all that for that. But some of them are quite satisfying and just funny and sort of silly and nice breaks from what you're doing. There's various races and mini games and, you know, they give you an opportunity to go around the world and meet everyone.

and because you're Zelda, you don't need to sneak into the Gerudo town. You can just go in for a first time, which was refreshing. Other than that, we haven't even mentioned, like, there are other mechanics where you can kind of control monsters and your own allies, right? You can mirror their movements. You can move them yourself, sort of ultra-hand style. And that, too, provides some puzzle-solving solutions, but was maybe underutilized, at least by me.

I guess ultimately that's my main gripe here, is that they built this really expensive sandbox and then whether because the game didn't force me to explore it enough or just my own kind of limited creativity, I feel like I didn't fully tap into the possibilities there. It's like overdetermined how many different ways there are to progress in this game. And so I wonder if that's a function of,

well, this is a first crack at this kind of thing. And it evolved over the course of development. And they're trying to be a Zelda game for everyone. And that's Zelda and Link and is old school and new school. And I wonder if there is sort of a direct sequel to this, whether they would refine that further and really bring out all of the possibilities of the game they built here because I think I've underutilized some aspects of it. Yeah.

All right. Well, personally, I'm still going to be wrestling with the ethical implications. of echoes. One reason why I made so many beds is that I felt a bit bad about summoning all of these living creatures and then making them wink out of existence. Do my moblins have souls? Where do they go when I make them disappear? Just creating and doing away with life on a whim. These are the things about echoes of wisdom that will keep me up at night. But the game itself also kept me up at night because I had so much fun playing it. I love The Legend of Zelda. I love discussing the Legend of Zelda with you. I think we'll have you back soon to talk about some or all of the

things that we teased coming up in in a big month of October for you. Charity core. Yes. So, thank you for coming on today. Yeah, thanks. And thanks to Devin Romado for producing today's episode and to our juniper ramical pal, not only for asking the question that I dunked on. I appreciate his asking me for my opinion, but also for his work as a senior podcast manager. hopefully, probably, we'll cover alien isolation, potentially Tomb Raider next time, but always in motion is the future. Let us know what you would like us to cover at ringerversegaming at gmail.com. And until then, may the Triforce be with you.