The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder are both pretty good. As a lifelong Nintendo fan, I tend to anticipate the release of a new game in either of those franchises with bated breath – these are the two series I’ve been playing longest, most consistently, and love the most. So, I’m a little surprised that, at the present moment, Echoes of Wisdom is sitting in the back half of my running top ten for 2024, and Mario Wonder didn’t even make last year’s list. Now that I’ve rolled credits on Echoes of Wisdom, I think I have an idea why that is.
Echoes Of Wisdom Echoed Zelda’s Past With Wisdom For Its Future
The longer I played Zelda’s first solo adventure, the more I could feel it losing me. It was never bad — Zelda games rarely are — but it felt a bit stranded between the two kinds of Zelda games it was trying to bring together. It was refreshing to return to the 2D dungeons I’ve been missing in the 11 years since A Link Between Worlds, but without bespoke items that the devs could design puzzles around, I ended up just spamming beds a lot of the time. Occasionally it pushed me to think outside the box, but mostly I could get by with the same handful of echoes.
I went through the same thing with Mario Wonder last year. I thought it was a pretty good Mario platformer, but it never blew me away. Wonder Seeds transforming the level was cool, but it never felt like the genre-defining innovation it could have been.
For a moment, playing these games back to back had me wondering: am I just getting old? Does the whimsy and gameplay-focused fun of Nintendo’s flagship series no longer work on me the way it did when I was a kid? Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey hit right as I was getting back into games after college. Did I just love those games because gaming felt so fresh after years away?
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Echoes Of Wisdom Could Be A Turning Point For Zelda, Nintendo, Or Both
Is this a sign that we could be getting more spin-off-like titles in the future? Or is this a one-and-done oddity?
The answer I’ve arrived at is no. I replayed Twilight Princess on Wii U shortly before Breath of the Wild came out. I had old Zelda, with all its excesses, fresh in my mind. As much as I’m nostalgic for that approach to dungeon design, it was a formula that needed to be shaken up, and Breath of the Wild did it with complete confidence in its new vision. It was different from the Zeldas that came before, and it owned that.
The First Step Toward Something Special
Both Echoes of Wisdom and Mario Wonder also feel like new directions. But they’re tentative first steps, not the fully formed 10/10 masterpieces I wanted them to be. After diverting from the traditional Zelda formula, Echoes of Wisdom represents Nintendo’s attempt to synthesize the two approaches, finding common ground between the lock-and-key dungeons old-school fans love and the systemic creativity new-school fans love (to be clear, I’m both old-school and new-school fans in this scenario). It isn’t quite there yet.
Mario has a similar problem. Nintendo made a pretty good game that finally moved on from the New Super Mario Bros. formula, but didn’t quite bridge the gap to the next big thing. Both feel like Uncharted 1s, not Uncharted 2s. They’re good games, and bursting with ideas, but they haven’t refined those ideas into something singular and special yet. Provided that neither game is an evolutionary dead-end, I have complete confidence that Nintendo will find their true form next time out. I’m just disappointed I have to wait another four or five years to get a glimpse.
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