I just watched your Smash remix ranking stream and at 1:30:12, I really hope all of that was just a joke, you feel sorry for him because he's pushing 30? Seriously? When did we get to this point where 30 is somehow considered old? It's fucking 30!! Do you not realize how ridiculous and laughable that sounds? I hate this new trend of people making themselves feel bad about getting old when they are NOT EVEN THAT OLD, It's such a stupid and toxic way of thinking, and we need to get the fuck over it already.
32:06 I might be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that's not an echoe of Conde's brother...like at all. I think it's just a random evil yeti. Which is why we don't see his brother in the Still World, because he's not in the Still World. And we DO see his brother. Granted it's in the end credits and it's just his hot air balloon from a distance, but that's more than enough for me. Edit: 32:45 like I said. Plus if his brother DID look like Scorchill, they would have had no reason NOT to show him (cuz they have his model). Final Edit: Plus his brother is shown to have horns like Conde's in the drawings, and Scorchill doesn't have red eyes like the other evil echoes.
Yeah, Tri even says that Scorchill doesn't look like the drawing they found, confirming it's not Conde's brother. Conde was just alone for so long that when he finally sees something that kinda looks like his brother he just assumes it's him, causing himself a ton of pain in the process
agree, but technically we don't know if conde's brother is in the still world or not. he set off to Holy Mount Lanayru from Hebra Peak in his hot-air balloon, and as we see in the still world, the dungeon itself is in Holy Mount Lanayru, NOT Hebra Peak, which means Holy Mount Lanayru has been eaten by a rift (wherever it is in the real world). so conde could be in the still world too somewhere, and we inadvertently saved him by clearing the dungeon though I agree that Skorchill is not Conde's brother
Btw, you can skip the whole dungeon in the water temple by just going for the boss key and using the spider to reach the top. So, that dungeon is even worse.
I don't mean to be contrarian, but I really don't understand the reasoning behind the idea that a skippable puzzle is a bad puzzle. In my opinion, just because you can essentially skip the whole dungeon with clever echo usage doesn't make the dungeon worse. The puzzles are pretty clever and kind of difficult if you actually do them, and just because it's possible to bypass them entirely doesn't mean the puzzles are bad. If someone hands you a Rubik's cube and challenges you to solve it, and you instead choose to just set it down and go on with your day and ignore the challenge, that doesn't make the Rubik's cube worthless, nor does it make the challenge any less valid. If you don't mind explaining, I'd love to hear your reasoning for why you feel this way, I'm genuinely curious.
@@the-building-manI think it’s toward the beginning because everyone calls Ganon the blue monster. They seemingly don’t know him. I thought this was to dodge spoilers for the end of Tears.
@@Gamefreak-kb2ni Except it's just as likely that this Hyrule hasn't dealt with an incarnation of Ganon for centuries, if not longer. The game has to take place at least after OoT because of Ganon's existence (since Null can only create Echoes of creatures they've encountered/interacted with). I think the most likely story for this Ganon is that he was defeated long ago and either killed or sealed away in the void, Null then either finds him or just the trident, since the trident doesn't seem to be an echo and might actually function similarly to swordfighter mode, transforming any entity into Ganon (which follows how Four Swords Adventures Ganon gains his power from the trident). Null then used the power of this new Echo of theirs to try and capture both the priestess and hero (the events at the start of the game), but it's been so long since Ganon's defeat that the name has been lost to time, similar to that of the Triforce itself
On top of what everyone above says, places from A Link to the Past/Between Worlds are crumbling into ruins or are gone. I recommend looking at comparison video between A Link to the Past and Echoes. It is fascinating as it is slightly heartbreaking to see.
25:29 Couple things about your timeline placement: 1) It is impossible for the Triforce to have been named after Tri. This would require the game to take place before Skyward Sword (where the Triforce was called such), which would be incompatible with the existence of Zelda as a character. 2) It is irrelevant that the creation story is told, as the creation story is told to Zelda directly by the Goddesses themselves. The map strongly hints that the game takes place between A Link Between Worlds and Legend of Zelda, as the world map is almost identical to the LttP/LBW map except that a few of the landmarks are in ruins and it covers a slightly larger area.
It wouldn't make much sense for it to take after A Link Between Worlds, since no one knows what Ganon is. Given how ToTK basically confirmed that it and BOTW are retcons, it wouldn't be surprising if it was the case for Echoes of Wisdom.
@@godzyllaa I don't think in a different timeline they would be likely to build the same buildings in the same exact places. Specifically the Desert temple ruins.
It does not really make sense to base the timeline placement on the lack of the name "triforce", because Skyward Sword still exists and has the triforce in a prominent role with that name. More likely is that the name was lost to time. Either way, it is kinda weird how many games we have gone through without "triforce" appearing, heck the iconography is all over BotW and TotK and yet it is never directly referenced anywhere as far as I know.
The triforce is to hyrule the equivalent of a cross or a spiral to us humans, a really old symbol thats been along for milennia (yes crosses are waaaay older than christianism)
in defence of manhandla, as someone who used deku babas the whole game because eating enemies is fun, there came times when I had my echo eat a bomb and the echo instantly died, so when I encountered the metal version of manhandla it instantly came to me that I would have to use bombs. its a pretty good staple that enemies that attack with their mouths have a good weakness to bombs. heck the thought of pulling their heads to expose their weakpoint never came to me. (not even for the void fight) so I think that manhandla fight is pretty cool.
i think another kinda cool thing is you can find the second arena before the first, after wandering the room for a bit i left and then finally went into the first fight, which made the purpose of the second room incredibly obvious.
I never bothered using the Baba echos myself, so it never occurred to me to feed them bombs. I just yoinked at the heads while setting my best attacking echos on their necks.
For me it was because I’ve played twilight princess before. It seemed pretty obvious that plants needed to burn and armored babas needed to be blown up from inside
A few points I noticed while watching the video. 1. In the water dungeon, you can skip pretty much the whole thing. You mentioned the first room, but there's also the main room that can be skipped with a Crawtula. 2. Water block is more convenient but it doesn't usually open up any area that you couldn't also access with a Crawtula or some other echo. 3. The Mole boss from the Gerudo dungeon has a few other ways you can make him vulnerable. In both phases you can try to pull at him with bind. In Phase two anytime he dives, you can place a statue down and try to get him to dive into it. This speeds up the fight considerably. 4. In that room where you need Link to reach a button, I used a platboom to help him reach it. I just figured I would mention it because it seemed a lot simpler than the boulders. 5. I don't think the devs intended for you to use the swordform bombs in those rooms. I mean sure, they made it an option but they already know players would have bombfish or the "Zhirro?/Ghirro?" (the flying enemy that shoots bombs). The bombfish can even be used with bind to get rid of that one block that you mentioned was difficult to blow up. 6. You're wrong about not being able to hit Volvagia's latter phases with the sword. At this point you should have the rock platform that you can place down in front of Volvagia. 7. I don't think your conclusions on where the game is placed in the timeline are correct. If anything most of the game seems to point to it taking place in the fallen hero timeline. It's Hyrule is very similar to the one from ALttP and ALBW. A lot of the enemies were taken from Link's Awakening and the oracle games. Even some of the bosses too. I am not saying that it definitively does take place in the fallen hero timeline, just that is what it looks most like to me. I don't think the game explaining the origin of the world means it must take place at the earliest and the characters calling the Triforce the Prime Energy also could be explained as the game taking so late in the timeline that nobody remembers the original name.I also strongly doubt the Triforce was called that due to Tri since it makes more sense to call it that because it's three triangles. 8. Ganon's trident can be grabbed with bind and used to hit him btw. 9. Those switches you need to press at the same time are a lot easier to get right with an armos or (I think) a slug type echo. They will move back and forth from the direction you send them until they hit something then turn around. 10. Like the water block, many of the places the cloud could help you reach can often just as easily be reached with a Crawtula or something else. It's definitely possible to use it to get to most if not all places, but I think this is balanced out by the fact that you have to be quick or else it breaks apart underneath you and it's not particularly quick either if you are aiming for height.
My thoughts exactly. Also, pulling the lance from Ganon generates sword form particles so it's the "intended" way. But you can always use smoothies, the game's open ended like that on purpose
LOL. It's hillarious. Some parts are awful because he found a way to make them much easier and quick. Some parts are awful because he did not find a way to make them easier and quick.
Ok The amount of times in this video I was like "wow, I didn't know you could do that and that's how you're supposed to solve that puzzle. I just brute force that" is more I care to mention
The opposite is true. The amount of times in this video I was like "Wow, he didn't solve the puzzle because he didn't know he could do that, and he just brute force it instead". Like Volvagia or Mogriff where you can hit from closer and more often, so its complain about "tediousness" and "wait time" suddenly become irrelevant.
32:27 PJiggles: "We know what [Conde's brother] looks like thanks to the clone..." Also 32:27 Tri: "We saw how Conde's brother looks in that painting. Nothing like this!"
I don’t know. Conde confusing someone he saw multiple times for his brother is suspicious and Scor-chill appears to know how to create complex machinery much like Conde’s brother implied to do via him creating a hot air balloon. It could be some other Yeti, but I like to theorize that it is Conde’s father actually, who probably taught Conde’s brother everything and would be implied to look like both Conde and his brother. Maybe the rift took the dead body of Conde’s dead. Creepy to think about.
@@fishnewt1331 But the painting also shows Condé's father having horns... Scorchill is just a monster Yeti and Condé confused it for his brother because he's been all alone for years so when he finally saw something that kinda looks like his brother, Condé assumed it was him, which lead to him getting hurt by Scorchill.
Yeah but that does not mean much when some echoes are just objectively better and more broken then others and allow you to trivialize so much of the game's design and challenges.
The whole point is to use echoes however you want and figure out having fun in the dungeons for fuck sake, linear mandatory dungeons was what made zelda a stale formula in 2011 with skyward sword @@tylermontgomery3513
Yeah i think its cool being able to find your own solutions to this stuff, and i have no idea why anyone would go out of their way to call a game's dungeons bad because they don't like fun
@@Bupboy The youtuber's arguing that the dungeons are bad because its puzzles with open-ended solutions aren't fun, not because they "don't like fun," which... doesn't make much sense. They don't see the dungeon design as fun to begin with. Personally, I agree with them. It feels much more rewarding and satisfying solving a puzzle with an intended, prescribed solution for some reason. I think the basic reward loop for traditional dungeon design was/felt something like, "I figured out what the developer intended, therefore I feel smart for solving it in that particular way." Now it feels like you throw out a bunch of tools until something sticks and personally I don't feel satisfied because there is little critical thinking skills involved, the latter of which, for me, is necessary to feel satisfied from puzzles.
In defense of the "broken echoes" that are continuously mentioned throughout the video; I think their use is completely intentional. This is a game with tons of possible options and there are bound to be things that are broken. You complained about the Cloud and Tile echoes, but they do the same thing as the crow/meat interaction that lets you fly forward infinitely. The red spider allows you to crawl basically anywhere if you know what you're doing, repositioning beds gives you a super far horizontal boost, ; the list goes on. Point being that the dev team probably understood that some echoes are going to be much more broken than others, and intentionally give you the same ability because it's fun. You're going to be doing the dungeon's basic idea either way. The only dungeon that's genuinely bad design is water, since there are several ways to skip to the boss key.
Frankly, the ability to cheese so many puzzles was really fun for me in its own right. I loveeeee shortcuts. Also that switch room in the jabul temple can be cheesed with ghinis because they go straight for switches when you lock on to them
With the water dungeon, once you fall in at the beginning section, you can literally just teleport back to the save point they just gave you to get out of the pitfall.
25:29 Well... I might be wrong but I don't think your explaination on where this game takes place in the timeline makes sence. You say it deffinatly takes place before oot even though this can easily be disprooved by looking at the gerudo desert for example. There is a ruin which has a former dungeon in A link to the Past. Here it is completely destroyed though which leads me to believe this game takes place at least after Alttp.
In the case of Skorchill, the devs did account for the possibility of a softlock there - there's a single Fire Keese you can echo in the Lanayru Temple. The devs also probably assumed most players would immediately echo everything they could. I know I did.
Feeding the boss bomb fish is actually what I did during my 1. playthrough, because you can feed fire enemies to the plant heads to stun them. This gave me the idea to feed something else to the smooth heads, which in typically Zelda fashion is bombs!
25:29 personally I thought it was really obvious that this game has to take place really late into the downfall timeline. The reason why the Triforce is instead called the Prime Energy is that it's been so long that people straight up forgot what it was actually called.
You’re wrong about the Ganon lore details lmfao. Mad about lore you don’t even understand. This game clearly takes place after a link to the past based on, everything from the map. Ganon in this game is an echo of the ALTTP one.
People are supposing EoW takes place at the beginning just because we get more details from the creation myth. But the destroyed temples and the map expasion shows the opposite.
There are two main sets of evidence for the game's place in the timeline. On the one hand, you have the Golden Goddesses still being present in the world, and being the ones giving out the three magic orbs that grant access to where the Triforce sleeps, the lack of any elemental dragons, light spirits, or other deputies left behind by the Goddesses to watch over Hyrule in their stead, and that Null has officially been creating rifts ever since the creation. On the other hand, you have the map and landmarks matching up with LttP/LBW except for multiple structures being in ruins, and you have the blue pig demon echo who appears to be armed with Ganon's Trident. Personally, I think it's easier to come up with excuses for why you'd have similar buildings in the same places (in fact, I have three - they rebuilt the ruined structures by the time of LttP; they built this game's structures based off knowledge of the future ones; both sets of buildings were built for the same purposes, so their location and appearance were dictated by the same mystical forces both times) than it is to come up with reasons why no-one knew about the Goddesses still hanging around, nor about the rifts continually opening and closing nor noticed the Might Crystals appearing everywhere. It seems more plausible that people, on a long enough timescale, built the same buildings more than once, than that either the Goddesses and the creation happened more than once, or that rifts kept happening throughout the timeline without anyone noticing... The blue pig demon Ganon form isn't exactly hard to explain away either - it doesn't exactly look like a red-haired man in black, so there's no reason Ganondorf had to have originated that form - it could work like the swordsman form in this game: some ancient Moblin chief or something wielded the Trident and, just like picking up the Sword of Might in this game gives Zelda access to Link's form, why shouldn't picking up the Trident give Ganondorf the form that becomes known as Ganon? It also fits well if you assume the Still World became the Sacred Realm, and the three Sanctions became the Spiritual Stones or Pendants or Pearls of other games. It even lets the Prime Energy be named after Tri...
25:29 I would assume it actually took place very late in the timeline since Null had time to break free from its bindings, and that celestial knowledge has significantly degraded such that they do not even know the proper names for the artifacts. As for being before Orcarina of Time, the aesthetic to me suggests this is some time after Triforce of the Gods (Link to the Past), which would give Null plenty of opportunity to find another reincarnation of Ganon.
During my playthrough, I also thought that this game took place pre OoT, but I've since come to learn that it probably takes place some time after ALTTP. Considering that the overworld in EoW is heavily based on ALTTP, and you can even find the ruins of the Desert Palace + the inclusion of Ganon(not Ganondorf) I think pretty much confirms it at least takes place after OoT, very likely in the downfall timeline.
I don't think Scortchio is Condi's brother In the spanish version, Tri sais "that wasn't Condi's brother after all" after defeating it. It could be a mistranslation, though But, if in the ending he's returning with the hot air ballon, doesn't that imply he wasn't there for when the breach apeared? I don't think he was swallowed and echoed
Scortchio isn't Conde's brother, Conde thinks it's him cause it's been too long since he last saw him and this feeling of missing him make him mistake Scortchio for his brother, we know from the drawings Conde's brother actually look like him but a bit bigger and we indeed see him alive on his hot air balloon in the credits
This video taught me so many uses of bind I never thought of. In pretty much every combat application, I just used enemy echoes to fight them directly, and it worked out fine. Did not try using it on a single boss.
25:29 Someone told me about your complaint, so I had to respond. Everything is based on the premise that the Triforce was named after Tri. I never thought that was true. I thought the Triforce's was just lost to history by that point. Problem solved.
"Waterblocks truly are the key to every problem in this game" I literally did not use them in any way you mentioned. Just because you found that you could drown enemies in them, that does not mean that everybody would come up with it nor that you had to use it at all.
Counter point, if the response to “this game mechanic is broken” is “then the player should choose to avoid it”, then why is it in the game at all? Don’t put stuff in your game and then tell players they’re the ones who should have known to avoid the mechanic you put in. If you don’t know how to design your game around the abilities you’re giving to the players, then don’t give them that ability.
@@Faint366I feel like it should change from "players should avoid it" to "players should not try to exploit it." It's fine to have some broken items in a game. But it would be a player's fault if they decide to water block over every part of the game and be like "man, there is not a lot to do around here."
I'm only past the Gerudo segment of the video but I have an observation. Zelda has a huge variety of powerful tools, and just about every puzzle, obstacle, and combat encounter is trivial when those tools are applied. The thing is that it's usually not immediately intuitive which echoes are best for a situation, or what way to use them. If you have it all figured out, it's a cakewalk; if you don't, it can be a struggle. For example, I didn't know about the Water Block's powerful combat applications until I watched a speedrun utilize them when I was already on my second playthrough. I'd bet most players didn't figure that one out, at least not before scrapping for their life with at least one wizzrobe. I also dismissed them pretty quickly as a way to gain height, but I had my own answer to everything in the Platboom, which I used to skip Jabul Ruins like a boss. Echo Ganon was the hardest fight in the game for me because I hadn't yet developed an understanding of how much damage different attacks dealt. A close second was Mogryph, which was a brutal struggle because I didn't realize it could be knocked out of its charge attack. Given the placement of the statues in that arena, I bet most players DID figure out how to block Mogryph's dash, but let me tell you, I felt like a dang genius when I smacked him on his descent with a rising Platboom. Puzzles are like that too. You fall into a rhythm where you use whatever handful of broken tools you picked to trivialize 90% of them, and then get stuck for a couple minutes on the last 10%. Everything about Echoes of Wisdom's design is begging you to use a little brain power to break out of the default sequence and break the whole game. I do like that - I think it's perfect for Zelda. The one thing I'd critique is that I wish there were a few more truly challenging puzzles and encounters, that force Zelda to dig deeper into her kit - probably as optional content. But I don't really know how you'd design stuff that's truly a match for her abilities. I don't have a super insightful conclusion, because I'm not very well-versed in puzzle design in games. I'm going to watch the rest of the video now. But I suspect I found Gerudo Sanctum a lot more challenging than whatever dungeon you thought was the most challenging, simply because I didn't figure out the same things you did.
One big question that I have is, if you don't use Strantula or Platboom or Water Block or Reverse Bind Crawltula or Gustmaster or what have you to trivialize any situation where you need to gain height - what are you missing out on? There's only so many configurations of beds, crates, trampolines, etc. And you'd probably stick to the same combination to ascend most ledges. And it would be trivial to reach the ledges in, say, the stealth section of Hyrule Castle. It seems like to "make platforming interesting" in a traditional sense, you'd have to deny Zelda basically all her abilities and force her to rely on a specific strategy to make these sections "work". But I'm quite glad that, most of the game, Zelda is at max power and flying over gaps with the Floating Tile. Indeed, I found the Deku Jail to be perhaps the most frustrating segment in the game. Again, I feel like challenges could be added - perhaps powerful Echoes are slow and more situations are time-bound. Or, more traps and surprises are set up to force you to improvise when one of your plans goes awry. But I think that on the whole, skipping this game's challenges and engaging with this game's challenges are one and the same.
While I'm writing an excessive amount here, I may as well add more. I personally didn't mind how much health Echo Ganon had given his status as the "final boss" of the first half of the game (it turned it into a war of attrition, the only battle in the game that ran through my entire smoothie supply), but I can understand how that would be problematic. What's really amazing about the battle, though, is everything you experience when you don't solely exploit swordfighter form without exploring other options. Trying to position Echoes around his movement and Echo-erasing spinning blade was a ton of fun, as was using Bind to slam his blade back into himself before he could get away. Dead Man's Volley offers a choice: expend a chunk of swordfighter gauge you might need later for big damage (and gamble on executing the volley correctly), or kite the attack around and try to get what damage you can with your Echoes? Echo Ganon is - and I should give it some time to account for recency bias - a top 5 Zelda boss for me now (I've played 6 Zelda games). Conversely, I had a distaste for the room you (or should I say "the video", given how deep I've buried this take) praised at 27:18. First, I assumed the frost geyser would extinguish the fire orb and avoided it immediately, so I didn't learn you could turn the fire orb into an ice orb until the final puzzle. Then, I was at a loss for what to do, because I didn't spot the Small Key for the longest time. And finally, I had no need to re-freeze the room to get around the fire geysers, because a little Platboom magic got me through just fine. In other words, I didn't engage with the puzzle at all because I had a solid understanding of powerful tools I could use for puzzle-skipping. Whether or not something is challenging or trivial in Echoes of Wisdom really comes down to what the player knows how to do. Things are more challenging, and often more fun, when they don't know what they're doing. What each individual player figures out or not will be wildly different (you can bind chests!?). Your reward for figuring out the broken stuff - or having a bajillion salted milk smoothies I suppose - is trivialized challenges. That's a double-edged sword, but like I said - aside from some more challenging situations here and there (stuff that forces improv), I wouldn't want Echoes of Wisdom to be anything else, and I wouldn't want Zelda's toolkit to be any less broken.
18:40 Interesting thing is that Volvagia seems to encourage the use of Swordfighter Bombs and other explosives to speed up breaking the crystal. Not only do bombs and explosives immediately detonate on contact with lava/lava floors, they demolish the crystal in about 2-3 explosions. Not to mention that the instant explosions give bombs and explosives really good DPS on Volvagia's down phases.
25:29 This is making a lot of assumptions. You're saying just because we hear the retelling of the creation of the world, and the fact the residents of Hyrule seem to not know what the Triforce is, that this must be the beginning of the timeline. But there's nothing physically here that actually proves that, and instead everything physical, such as the existence of Ganon and the formation of the world being incredibly similar to ALTTP and ALBT, show that it can't be anywhere near the beginning of the timeline. It's entirely likely that the Triforce has just been forgotten to time, or that this is one of the timelines where the Triforce just isn't as well documented as it is in the others (I've seen that the Child Timeline is a good example of this, as Ganondorf just magically gets the Triforce and then it just vanishes with him at the end of TP). We've even seen the Triforce still be present and yet forgotten in more modern games; its insignia is present all over the Hyrule of BOTW and TOTK, but nobody ever mentions it by name, and it isn't the magic macguffin everyone's after anymore. TLDR: There is no reason you should assume this takes places near the beginning of the timeline, and more than enough physical reasons to believe it takes place further down than most others.
30:15 i think thats totally fair but if you think using the shotgun is cheap and makes the encounter boring, then there's literally nothing stopping upu from just not using it
I hated the Ice Dunegon when I went through it, mostly because I didn't realize that you can change the Orbs until the END. Which means I had to go through several Puzzles without knowing that i can change the Fire Orb into an Ice Orb to Freeze some of the Rooms, it was pretty frustrating to say the least.
You can pull the arms on the final fight to instantly destroy them??? I just thought it was normal to just spam the arms with attacks to destroy them, i wondered why that fight took so long.
So game design is difficult. Mostly because people don’t agree on what is good and bad gameplay. Traditional Zelda dungeons were fun but once you know the gimmick it’s easy or super frustrating depending on if you’re good at the gimmick. On this one even if you know the gimmick you can try different ways to do things meaning each play through can be different as can each players experience. I rarely used the strandulla or water block not because I forced myself not to but because it wasn’t the first thing to come to mind. I miss traditional dungeons but the flip side is I actually beat tears of the kingdom and breath of the wild and echoes of wisdom relatively quickly instead of taking forever and having to restart because I forgot what was going on.
30:13 I'm sorry I have to break down this because it is just a bad way to explain things. If you remove the "deathmatch" of things, because in Zelda contexte, you don't play for your fucking life, the exemple ended as "a match against a WWE fighter, you WILL pick the shotgun" and that's just wrong. If you absolutely want to win no matter the way, yeah you will take the shotgun, but if you want to deserve your win, to do things challenging, or heck if you are a WWE fighter yourself, you will absolutely not taking that shotgun. Back to Zelda, if you want the game to be challenging, if you want to feel satisfaction going forward, yes you can totally ignore the cloud/water blocks of you don't find satisfactions in games. To break down the exemple of the WWE fighter, I mention a scenario where you're a WWE fighter yourself too, we can translate that to being a long time Zelda player: shotgun/cloud are for beginners who just want to end the challenge no matter the way, taking the fights with your bare hand/finding another solution than cheesing with clouds is for a WWE fighter/a long time Zelda player. And also, at some point you mentionned the last "dungeon" with a mix of every environments etc. that you can just cheese with cloud, and said "why bother when you can just skip?" This is an extremely bad take. Why bothering playing the game if you can just watch the end on youtube? You will tell me that if when you boot up the game for the first time and there was a button "end of the game" right in the menu, you will not play the full game because "why bothering, if you can do that". I think the whole problem come from what you said at the end, that you thinks it's boring to make your journey yourself and find your own solution, and you don't understand why bothering finding a solution if you can cheese with op echoes. I really suggest you to change this mindset if you want to enjoy EoW more. I can get it's frustrating, because you can feel like you're losing your time, but honestly if you're so negative about cloud and water blocks, I bet you're not having fun using them, and so if you're not having fun, you are losing your time anyway. Game are made to be fun, and if you have to force yourself to not doing something even if the game let you do for having fun, that's totally okay. Personally I find that even more satisfying. There are some rooms in the game that I cheesed with water or cloud and I was like "no, I can do it otherwise, that's lame" and I restart the room without water or cloud this time, and it's way more satisfying, you're litterally telling the game that even if you have easy ways to do it, you are the one who decide how you will go forward, thanks to the freedom that same game gives you. So yes, "don't like it, don't use it" is a valid argument, like it or not. If you have multiple solutions in the game, you are totally free to pick up the one you like the most, and that's the must fun to your eyes. Anyway, great video as usual with perfect editing, I hope I didn't feel mean in my comment, that's not my goal at all, I just absolutely don't agree with you and I letting you know, that's it. And sorry if my english isn't good, I'm not english. So anyway 2, take care and can't wait to see your future videos!
See, this is why i LOVE Zelda dungeons, they get kinda creative with their approach to dungeon layouts. Me, personally, ive once or twice tried thinking about some unique dungeon ideas of my very own and among the best i could come up with was an Aztec style dungeon that pretty much became a giant pinball machine with you, traversing each room in a rolling cage, as the ball itself. The boss would be what i would describe as a " Demonic one-eyed centipede that takes refuge within a giant slot machine at the center end of the boss room" that you could only damage by getting matching symbols on its reels to deal it massive damage somehow. This dungeon idea is a work in progress.
40:50 I fully disagree. This is actually my favorite part of the game, you have almost infinite ways of solving the puzzle and it's up to how creative you are to figure them out.
30:11 IMO, this analogy falls flat when applied to this game. Mostly because I had a different experience playing it than what was described in your video, and I was still achieving the same results. It was a mix of "I didn’t even think of that" and "why didn’t you do this instead?"
I like the water temple. I fell down the pit, warped back, jumped over the hole, then climbed up to the boss door, didnt hack the key so i went back to look for it, took the first door to the right, found the key and fought the boss.
the triforce being called prime energy doesnt necessarily mean it takes place in the past, it could just as easily mean it takes place in a future where the name of the triforce was lost to time.
I actually barely used the water blocks to skip platforming, but I did use the yellow platform enemy to do basically the same thing, so yeah The water blocks aren't the only broken platforming thing haha
I just assumed that water blocks could only be placed next to existing water, so I never used them to break platforming. Though platforming seemed broken enough anyway with beds and then clouds.
I didn't like the Faron Temple that much. I'm not a fan of dark sections in video games, and the boss fight was really annoying for me to fight. The Lanayru Temple on the other hand is honestly one of the best Zelda dungeons in my opinion.
25:28 your first mistake was caring about the timeline and story at all almost every zelda game contradicts every other zelda game. also youre just wrong too. the triforce was named in skyward sword, so it being called the prime energy is just an odd choice that can be chalked up to echoes of wisdom being set in an intellectual dark age of hyrule. its also implied canon that ganon reincarnates at this point too. echoes of wisdom could be at almost any point in the timeline and itd make the same level of sense. because the devs dont care about zeldas overarching story
6:33 your solution here is solving a problem that never even existed, I really love it. You can just... jump down in the water, swim down, bind the torch pedestal, and go back up. But your solution is much funnier
Hey, I think that interesting side effect of your dungeon review is that you did not account for certain play styles. When you were talking about the tallus boss, you said that you absolutely had to use bind to pull the rock off of its head. I never even did that. I just used crows because they were flying enemies. Additionally, I didn't even know the bind dark nut trick. Or that you could kill deku babas with it
I used a lot of water blocks but i dont think you can blame it for being "too powerfull" when so many other absurd (sometimes even better) options there are. You unlock Platboom pretty early on and it already gives you so much height, more than what water blocks can do for a loong time... You can use mole holes to insta kill enemies just like water blocks, and they cant even break it.... And tile was my most used echo for a reason, it completely trivialises every horizontal gap ever, with the black spider triviliazing almost every vertical gap You can even fly infinetly with tiles too (tho its easier if you have 6 triangles, that is really lategame) Yeah, i do think water blocks are a really versitile and strong option, but if you were not trivializing puzzles using water blocks, you'd be trivializing then using tiles, Platboom, spiders, cloud etc... And if you were not trivilizing combat using water blocks, you'd be using mole holes, trowing enemies in the void, or spamming the samey enemies you do every time... (combat is not the strong part of this game lets be honest) I do think its a general issue with the game, but i dont think its fair to blame/penalize any specific echo for that, its the design of the game in general
38:08 I discovered during this fight that you can actually target their weakpoint, so I got in a pattern of using bomb fish to stun, targeting their weakpoint and spawning a lizalfos, which makes the AI only go for the weakpoint, then grabbing the head with bind to hold it still for the lizalfos, worked really well!
22:26 i did not even think of using bind here, and you can hit all weak spots without bind. The shoulder one is easy after his slam, and the head one you can jump at his hands after the slam and then jump hit him.
About the note on 25:28: This game takes place after ALBW/TFH (in those games it's the same hero for both games and era). Think about the whole game as an era that is so distant from those games that people forgot Ganon's name, the name of the Triforce and much more. It's a very distant moment in time and too far away from all what happened after OoT, ALttP, Oracle of S/A, ALBW and TFH. The kingdom has not been yet reduced to a tiny country as it is shown in Zelda 1 and 2.
Yo PJiggles, I know this ain’t related to the video, but did you know that the smoke effect that surrounds a fighter in Smash Ultimate can go away after a certain amount of time? It’s like an hour and apparently swap characters like Pokémon Trainer and Aegis will reset the timer, kinda, whenever you swap with them, and yes, this is for sure a real thing, this isn’t made up, and to anyone reading this who doesn’t believe me, then go in training and make the game speed x2 and wait until the smoke effect disappears by itself, you’ll be surprised and have a nice day to whoever read all this
I know your argument water is "just don't use it if you have a problem," but I see it as more of an accessibility option. Zelda especially this one is geared for more all ages, so if a little kid can spawn a lot of water blocks and solve the puzzle he's gonna have a great time. For older Zelda fans like us, we can use that solution but I feel as if they left it there for that younger audience. And then the other echoes I feel like give you such a wider freedom of expression in how you approach things; if you like platbooms use the platbooms, but someone else might like using the box and decorative tree. Idk I don't get the point you're trying to make where there should only be 1 solution to solve a puzzle. Imagine in Mario Odyssey if there was only 1 solution on how to get a moon, that would feel so so restrictive. And same with Zelda sometimes there are 1 solution, but the more options the player has to more accessible it is to everyone
@@emperortgp2424 it was fine but now it is better, it's an evolution in level design to have choices. They make it for more accessibility (more people of all ages playing) and replayability, more fun out of it because you can comeback and think another solution, where before there was just one. That is key for creativity.
9:25 the problem with this issue is that you find the final statue very late in the dungeon and the final clue comes right after it so you’re not gonna have much of a reason to go back and “brute force” the puzzle if the other hint is literally right there and missing it will be difficult if you’re trying to explore the whole dungeon. The sand thing covering the boss key and door was a weird nitpick And as others have mentioned, you absolutely do not need to wait around for the boss to rush at you to attack him. You have arrows and can damage him with echoes too
I skipped that part using an iceblock and that wind generating enemy. Literally the only puzzle in the game where solving it felt satisfying because you actually have to think outside the box (or rather, water block) and use underutilized echoes for an underutilized interaction. Too bad it's not mandatory.
Regarding Mogryph, when he's in phase 2 you can also stun him with a statue during the attack where you dives into the sand while flying so there are multiple attacks which let you stun him. You still have to wait but it's not as bad as having to wait for just one single attack.
I actually don't think water is the best echo to gain height. Yes it will work in the vast majority of cases (95%), but Platboom also works. When you have the frog bracelet to be able to jump on it directly, you're set for the game. You get more height than by stacking water, and much quicker too. Goated echo, it was my most used by the end of the game
Volvagia was always easy to hit with my sword personally, i just placed some big rocks to get closer. Though i agree it has too much health and no real phase 2 is dumb
I think a simple solution to the freedom of being able to do what you want would be to have the still world function like how you mentioned shrines prevent you from spawning devices. Once you enter the still world, Tri’s power will be diminished, and will lose the ability to summon echoes you’ve previously learned. When you’re in the still world you can only use echoes that are available to collect in that specific area of where the rift is. This you can’t summon water blocks or clouds in other dungeons or areas of the still world.
I think our lists are basically identical, maybe swapping Hyrule Castle and Suthorn Ruins. While I still enjoyed the dungeons more than anything else BotW/TotK had to offer, I agree that the "unlimited freedom" combined with really broken echoes kinda made a lot of dungeons (and other areas of the game) trivial. I almost lucked out in that I did the Zora one last of that bunch (getting the water block later), and the Lanayru one last of that bunch (getting the cloud echo last). But even then, yeah, so many things trivialized the game, I really hope in the future they reel it back a bit and make, like... ACTUAL puzzles lmfao Also yeah, the fact that you can skip Jabul Ruins almost entirely with water blocks even further brings home how bad it is lol
You can actually stun Mogryph on his way down if you put a statue underneath him, but as another commenter pointed out, you don’t even need to stun him to damage him
I'll be honest, sometimes I forget I even have an echo that could have trivialized a puzzle and end up going a whole roundabout solution. Likewise when I first finished the game I didn't even know you could pull Null's arms to expose the weak points for Link to destroy, I just spammed enemies and that ended up working fine despite taking longer. Sometimes the obvious solutions aren't as obvious at first glance, and that's very likely due to Echoes of Wisdom's extremely open toolkit, you just don't always think about the "best" solution and rather those that work just as well. I do agree though, the water block and to an extent flying tile does trivialize exploration quite a bit. Beds also notoriously make the game very easy due to being an easily accessible way to restore hearts without spending any resources other than time, the only time I used beds during a boss fight though is in the Volvagia fight, as the boss spends a lot of time doing pretty much nothing.
Tying into this, that puzzle where you pulled the shield off a statue in Suthorn Ruins, I completely forgot about. You can imagine what this entails, but I was able to beat the game without that knowledge.
8:00 also, unlike every other sequence in the game where you're 'forced' to do something, you can just... warp back to the top of the room and skip it after falling down.
A few things wrong here: 1) I've never encountered ANY criticism over TOTK/BOTW letting the player find their own solution. On the contrary, I've heard tons of praise for this. And I think it's a great direction to go. Have an intended solution but let players find their own methods to puzzles. 2) Jabul ruins is great because you can sequence break a lot, to the point where if you know which room has the boss key, you can go ahead, grab it, and go straight to the boss. It's a really fun dungeon to replay. 3) That bomb wall you complained about in Eldin isn't an issue if you just build a platform. 4) You complain about having to shoot the crystal on Volvagia then immediately afterwards say "oh you can bind it to pull it off faster". You made it more tedious for yourself. As for her health stat being too high, when you can't reach her with your sword, you're expected to throw bombs. 5) Not sure where you got "this game takes place extremely early in the timeline" from. The fact that the Triforce is called the Prime Energy could simply be that it happens so far in the future that the name "Triforce" has been forgotten. Besides, Triforce is what the people of Hyrule call it. I think this is the first time it's explicitely been mentioned by the Goddesses since you rarely get to speak to them. So it could be that that's the "true" name of the triforce. Common theories place this either on fallen timeline (because of the similarities to the LTTP/LBW map) or child timeline. Not sure why you decided it was early timeline, and despite so much evidence pointing to the contrary, decided to stick with that instead of considering you may have been wrong. 6) Feeding bombs to the miniboss in Faron Temple is 100% the intended way, given that you're taught to feed bombs to Deku Babas if you don't pull their heads, and it's also the intended way to fight it in the Oracles games (which is where the boss is pulled from).
16:59, I first played the game in hero mode. Hearts don't happen in that mode, the more content I watch of this game the more honestly surprised how much easier the game is off of hero mode.
For the faron boss key plant you forgot to mention the mushrooms that were shown to decay when away from the plant which is how i found the key both times
20:05 My roommate decided to play Wind Waker for the first time and beat Dragon Roost Yesterday. I always thought the same thing, that the dungeon’s puzzles were pretty limited and trivial, and I figured that since she beat BOTW, TOTK, and EoW, she’d have no problem breezing through it, but those puzzles really did give her some trouble. I think Dragon Roost is trickier than we Zelda veterans give it credit for, like yeah the puzzles are limited but a lot of them are based on looking in unexpected parts of the environment. It’s a lot better of a tutorial dungeon than people give it credit for, ya know?
About the "ganon" thing. Yeah, i understand the problem. But to be fair, Null does summon stuff he did not absorv throughout the game. Most bosses were not absorved, they were just echoes we never even see the "real thing" (like gohma, it doesnt seem gohma was even in faron before the rifts show up). But yeah, the payoff of ganon in this hame is kinda boring (tho who am i to say, i actually really like Ganondorfs appearance in TotK)
So with the Ganon fight, the first phase is thrust attacks, second phase he switches to fire-bats and trident throw, third phase replaces the trident throw with dead mans volley and alternates its use with the fire-bats, and for the final phase he brings back every moves and speeds them up slightly.
42:40 if it wasn't for the clouds navigating the map would be a pain in the ass, adding the clouds in the game is actually good design. As I mentioned before it's obvious that their intention was not to make vertical movement the main feature of the game
According to what I saw in a speed run video, you don't even have to attack the null section in the water, you just have to wait for him to reach the end, and the enemies he throws at you don't hurt you.
Do you know the Boss Keys-series? They make diagrams of every Zelda dungeon in terms of how the keys and locked doors all fit. A more complex layout then hints at a more complex dungeon. If you would do the same for the dungeons in this game, almost all of their diagrams would basically boil down to a straight line with very small detours to get the corresponding keys. The only dungeon that deviates from that and creates a more complex layout is Faron Temple. Which I think is exactly why it feels so far above the rest.
25:29 No, you're so right. I was SO into placing this game before TMC but the fact that Ganon's here makes it outright impossible which is extremely tragic to me
Not only can you skip the first area in the water temple on a second playthough when you know, you can even skip it the first time. You can just build water blocks back up to the transition and hop back out, which is what I did
18:40 in regards to this boss, the intention is actually to use bombs I think. They explode still when hitting the lava, and deal way more damage. I defeated them rather quickly
Funny, I basically never used water blocks after the stilled area lol I mostly abused the bed and trampoline, until I got the yellow platform monster and the flying tiles.
Like I get that zelda didn't have a sword and she's like a mage or whatever but swords like... exist?? I can't even beat people up with the staff? like brother im confused. like IDK give her a spear if swords are really only link's thing.
I agree with Faron so much. Its the first open dungeon that feels like a dungeon IMO. I also ended exploring the whole temple before fighting Manhandla.
The greatest sin of Volvagia is that even when you know the "trick" to beating it, the fight doesn't actually get faster or more interesting. My first playthrough, I struggled with Mogryph cause I didn't think to use statue echoes in his second phase and just chalked him up as a damage sponge. Once I learned that-and in repeat fights used Roboblin for his tornado attack-he became significantly better and more fun to fight. I thought you NEEDED to shock Gohma's crystals while she was on the wall until I rubbed my two braincells together and shot her eye, and later I improved my strategy even more by using Roboblin to cover her eggs and tack on extra damage if I keep him safe-I even made the crystals part easier with clever usage of Drippitune + electric echoes. Now she's my favorite boss! Nothing truly helps Volvagia: pulling on the necklace helps stagger her, but she still takes at least 3 minutes to defeat, and even strong echoes like Wizzrobes and Lizalfos Lv. 3 don't make her better. Side note: I actually really like that Jabul Ruins is hella cheesable lol. With most dungeons, the cheese is pretty light all things considered, so it's just really funny where one dungeons entire identity is cheese. Considering it's very easy to get the Crawltula echo prior, and you get the water block during, it definitely feels intentional for better or worse. At least it gives it a little more personality than Gerudo Sanctum imo, better boss aside.
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Awesome video!
No
I just watched your Smash remix ranking stream and at 1:30:12, I really hope all of that was just a joke, you feel sorry for him because he's pushing 30? Seriously? When did we get to this point where 30 is somehow considered old? It's fucking 30!! Do you not realize how ridiculous and laughable that sounds?
I hate this new trend of people making themselves feel bad about getting old when they are NOT EVEN THAT OLD, It's such a stupid and toxic way of thinking, and we need to get the fuck over it already.
no-one is ever clicking that.
32:06 I might be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that's not an echoe of Conde's brother...like at all. I think it's just a random evil yeti. Which is why we don't see his brother in the Still World, because he's not in the Still World.
And we DO see his brother. Granted it's in the end credits and it's just his hot air balloon from a distance, but that's more than enough for me.
Edit: 32:45 like I said. Plus if his brother DID look like Scorchill, they would have had no reason NOT to show him (cuz they have his model).
Final Edit: Plus his brother is shown to have horns like Conde's in the drawings, and Scorchill doesn't have red eyes like the other evil echoes.
Yeah, Tri even says that Scorchill doesn't look like the drawing they found, confirming it's not Conde's brother.
Conde was just alone for so long that when he finally sees something that kinda looks like his brother he just assumes it's him, causing himself a ton of pain in the process
32:26 Dude used footage of Tri explaining how Scorchill looks nothing like Condé's brother and still missed it
agree, but technically we don't know if conde's brother is in the still world or not. he set off to Holy Mount Lanayru from Hebra Peak in his hot-air balloon, and as we see in the still world, the dungeon itself is in Holy Mount Lanayru, NOT Hebra Peak, which means Holy Mount Lanayru has been eaten by a rift (wherever it is in the real world). so conde could be in the still world too somewhere, and we inadvertently saved him by clearing the dungeon
though I agree that Skorchill is not Conde's brother
Btw, you can skip the whole dungeon in the water temple by just going for the boss key and using the spider to reach the top. So, that dungeon is even worse.
That's just how I did it because I saw water and we all know that water temples in Zelda games suck
That's way funnier though.
I mean you can do this if you know to do it and where the key is.
I don't mean to be contrarian, but I really don't understand the reasoning behind the idea that a skippable puzzle is a bad puzzle.
In my opinion, just because you can essentially skip the whole dungeon with clever echo usage doesn't make the dungeon worse. The puzzles are pretty clever and kind of difficult if you actually do them, and just because it's possible to bypass them entirely doesn't mean the puzzles are bad. If someone hands you a Rubik's cube and challenges you to solve it, and you instead choose to just set it down and go on with your day and ignore the challenge, that doesn't make the Rubik's cube worthless, nor does it make the challenge any less valid.
If you don't mind explaining, I'd love to hear your reasoning for why you feel this way, I'm genuinely curious.
I remember trying that but there was an invisible ceiling blocking me until I completed all the rooms
25:28 my thought is because it's called the prime energy is that it takes place so late in the timeline that they forgot its other name
I actually thought it might be in the start of the timeline considering tri.
@@the-building-manI think it’s toward the beginning because everyone calls Ganon the blue monster. They seemingly don’t know him. I thought this was to dodge spoilers for the end of Tears.
@@the-building-man Why would Tri be a sign that it happens early in the timeline?
@@Gamefreak-kb2ni Except it's just as likely that this Hyrule hasn't dealt with an incarnation of Ganon for centuries, if not longer.
The game has to take place at least after OoT because of Ganon's existence (since Null can only create Echoes of creatures they've encountered/interacted with).
I think the most likely story for this Ganon is that he was defeated long ago and either killed or sealed away in the void, Null then either finds him or just the trident, since the trident doesn't seem to be an echo and might actually function similarly to swordfighter mode, transforming any entity into Ganon (which follows how Four Swords Adventures Ganon gains his power from the trident).
Null then used the power of this new Echo of theirs to try and capture both the priestess and hero (the events at the start of the game), but it's been so long since Ganon's defeat that the name has been lost to time, similar to that of the Triforce itself
On top of what everyone above says, places from A Link to the Past/Between Worlds are crumbling into ruins or are gone. I recommend looking at comparison video between A Link to the Past and Echoes. It is fascinating as it is slightly heartbreaking to see.
25:29 Couple things about your timeline placement:
1) It is impossible for the Triforce to have been named after Tri. This would require the game to take place before Skyward Sword (where the Triforce was called such), which would be incompatible with the existence of Zelda as a character.
2) It is irrelevant that the creation story is told, as the creation story is told to Zelda directly by the Goddesses themselves.
The map strongly hints that the game takes place between A Link Between Worlds and Legend of Zelda, as the world map is almost identical to the LttP/LBW map except that a few of the landmarks are in ruins and it covers a slightly larger area.
It wouldn't make much sense for it to take after A Link Between Worlds, since no one knows what Ganon is.
Given how ToTK basically confirmed that it and BOTW are retcons, it wouldn't be surprising if it was the case for Echoes of Wisdom.
I feel like it takes place like thousands of years after LttP
@@godzyllaa I don't think in a different timeline they would be likely to build the same buildings in the same exact places. Specifically the Desert temple ruins.
It does not really make sense to base the timeline placement on the lack of the name "triforce", because Skyward Sword still exists and has the triforce in a prominent role with that name. More likely is that the name was lost to time. Either way, it is kinda weird how many games we have gone through without "triforce" appearing, heck the iconography is all over BotW and TotK and yet it is never directly referenced anywhere as far as I know.
The triforce is to hyrule the equivalent of a cross or a spiral to us humans, a really old symbol thats been along for milennia (yes crosses are waaaay older than christianism)
@@kyomademon453the crucifix fact is sick but just to let you know it’s Christianity, not Christianism
in defence of manhandla, as someone who used deku babas the whole game because eating enemies is fun, there came times when I had my echo eat a bomb and the echo instantly died, so when I encountered the metal version of manhandla it instantly came to me that I would have to use bombs. its a pretty good staple that enemies that attack with their mouths have a good weakness to bombs. heck the thought of pulling their heads to expose their weakpoint never came to me. (not even for the void fight) so I think that manhandla fight is pretty cool.
i think another kinda cool thing is you can find the second arena before the first, after wandering the room for a bit i left and then finally went into the first fight, which made the purpose of the second room incredibly obvious.
I never bothered using the Baba echos myself, so it never occurred to me to feed them bombs. I just yoinked at the heads while setting my best attacking echos on their necks.
For me it was because I’ve played twilight princess before. It seemed pretty obvious that plants needed to burn and armored babas needed to be blown up from inside
You can also kill the deku baba enemies pretty quickly with explosion enemies, its not just manhandla 2
Fans of the first game know that bombs are how you beat Manhandla. Or at least trivialise it :P
A few points I noticed while watching the video.
1. In the water dungeon, you can skip pretty much the whole thing. You mentioned the first room, but there's also the main room that can be skipped with a Crawtula.
2. Water block is more convenient but it doesn't usually open up any area that you couldn't also access with a Crawtula or some other echo.
3. The Mole boss from the Gerudo dungeon has a few other ways you can make him vulnerable. In both phases you can try to pull at him with bind. In Phase two anytime he dives, you can place a statue down and try to get him to dive into it. This speeds up the fight considerably.
4. In that room where you need Link to reach a button, I used a platboom to help him reach it. I just figured I would mention it because it seemed a lot simpler than the boulders.
5. I don't think the devs intended for you to use the swordform bombs in those rooms. I mean sure, they made it an option but they already know players would have bombfish or the "Zhirro?/Ghirro?" (the flying enemy that shoots bombs). The bombfish can even be used with bind to get rid of that one block that you mentioned was difficult to blow up.
6. You're wrong about not being able to hit Volvagia's latter phases with the sword. At this point you should have the rock platform that you can place down in front of Volvagia.
7. I don't think your conclusions on where the game is placed in the timeline are correct. If anything most of the game seems to point to it taking place in the fallen hero timeline. It's Hyrule is very similar to the one from ALttP and ALBW. A lot of the enemies were taken from Link's Awakening and the oracle games. Even some of the bosses too. I am not saying that it definitively does take place in the fallen hero timeline, just that is what it looks most like to me. I don't think the game explaining the origin of the world means it must take place at the earliest and the characters calling the Triforce the Prime Energy also could be explained as the game taking so late in the timeline that nobody remembers the original name.I also strongly doubt the Triforce was called that due to Tri since it makes more sense to call it that because it's three triangles.
8. Ganon's trident can be grabbed with bind and used to hit him btw.
9. Those switches you need to press at the same time are a lot easier to get right with an armos or (I think) a slug type echo. They will move back and forth from the direction you send them until they hit something then turn around.
10. Like the water block, many of the places the cloud could help you reach can often just as easily be reached with a Crawtula or something else. It's definitely possible to use it to get to most if not all places, but I think this is balanced out by the fact that you have to be quick or else it breaks apart underneath you and it's not particularly quick either if you are aiming for height.
My thoughts exactly. Also, pulling the lance from Ganon generates sword form particles so it's the "intended" way. But you can always use smoothies, the game's open ended like that on purpose
You're wrong about Mogryph, you can damage him at any time, he doesn't need to be stunned first to be vulnerable.
yeah, if you fight mogryph with flying or tanky echoes they can reach and hurt them, though i'm not sure if that really speeds the fight up that much.
I also shot him with arrows!
LOL. It's hillarious. Some parts are awful because he found a way to make them much easier and quick. Some parts are awful because he did not find a way to make them easier and quick.
Ok The amount of times in this video I was like "wow, I didn't know you could do that and that's how you're supposed to solve that puzzle. I just brute force that" is more I care to mention
The fact you can actually brute force these puzzles is crazy.
Btw I love your Kirby vs. The WORLD animation!
The opposite is true. The amount of times in this video I was like "Wow, he didn't solve the puzzle because he didn't know he could do that, and he just brute force it instead". Like Volvagia or Mogriff where you can hit from closer and more often, so its complain about "tediousness" and "wait time" suddenly become irrelevant.
32:27
PJiggles: "We know what [Conde's brother] looks like thanks to the clone..."
Also 32:27
Tri: "We saw how Conde's brother looks in that painting. Nothing like this!"
I don’t know.
Conde confusing someone he saw multiple times for his brother is suspicious and Scor-chill appears to know how to create complex machinery much like Conde’s brother implied to do via him creating a hot air balloon. It could be some other Yeti, but I like to theorize that it is Conde’s father actually, who probably taught Conde’s brother everything and would be implied to look like both Conde and his brother. Maybe the rift took the dead body of Conde’s dead. Creepy to think about.
Your profile picture gave me nightmaria
@@fishnewt1331 But the painting also shows Condé's father having horns...
Scorchill is just a monster Yeti and Condé confused it for his brother because he's been all alone for years so when he finally saw something that kinda looks like his brother, Condé assumed it was him, which lead to him getting hurt by Scorchill.
For nulls fight it didn’t know you could bind his arms so I just spammed him with my most powerful echo combinations and I had a blast with it
same 3x peahats are broken
Me, literally spamming the Zirro echo which spawns bombs fucking everywhere to defeat Null:
@@Otaku03494I felt like a god when I figured that out
I actually really like the dungeons in this game, there were a lot of good puzzles, and I liked how you can go about the dungeons however you want.
Yeah but that does not mean much when some echoes are just objectively better and more broken then others and allow you to trivialize so much of the game's design and challenges.
I agree, I loved using the cloud and water block to break the game tbh, but I definitely understand why some people would disagree
The whole point is to use echoes however you want and figure out having fun in the dungeons for fuck sake, linear mandatory dungeons was what made zelda a stale formula in 2011 with skyward sword @@tylermontgomery3513
Yeah i think its cool being able to find your own solutions to this stuff, and i have no idea why anyone would go out of their way to call a game's dungeons bad because they don't like fun
@@Bupboy The youtuber's arguing that the dungeons are bad because its puzzles with open-ended solutions aren't fun, not because they "don't like fun," which... doesn't make much sense. They don't see the dungeon design as fun to begin with.
Personally, I agree with them. It feels much more rewarding and satisfying solving a puzzle with an intended, prescribed solution for some reason. I think the basic reward loop for traditional dungeon design was/felt something like, "I figured out what the developer intended, therefore I feel smart for solving it in that particular way." Now it feels like you throw out a bunch of tools until something sticks and personally I don't feel satisfied because there is little critical thinking skills involved, the latter of which, for me, is necessary to feel satisfied from puzzles.
In defense of the "broken echoes" that are continuously mentioned throughout the video; I think their use is completely intentional. This is a game with tons of possible options and there are bound to be things that are broken. You complained about the Cloud and Tile echoes, but they do the same thing as the crow/meat interaction that lets you fly forward infinitely. The red spider allows you to crawl basically anywhere if you know what you're doing, repositioning beds gives you a super far horizontal boost, ; the list goes on.
Point being that the dev team probably understood that some echoes are going to be much more broken than others, and intentionally give you the same ability because it's fun. You're going to be doing the dungeon's basic idea either way. The only dungeon that's genuinely bad design is water, since there are several ways to skip to the boss key.
Frankly, the ability to cheese so many puzzles was really fun for me in its own right. I loveeeee shortcuts. Also that switch room in the jabul temple can be cheesed with ghinis because they go straight for switches when you lock on to them
With the water dungeon, once you fall in at the beginning section, you can literally just teleport back to the save point they just gave you to get out of the pitfall.
25:29 Well... I might be wrong but I don't think your explaination on where this game takes place in the timeline makes sence. You say it deffinatly takes place before oot even though this can easily be disprooved by looking at the gerudo desert for example. There is a ruin which has a former dungeon in A link to the Past. Here it is completely destroyed though which leads me to believe this game takes place at least after Alttp.
that and the tales the king says have been pasted down for so long they forgot the name of the prime energy
In the case of Skorchill, the devs did account for the possibility of a softlock there - there's a single Fire Keese you can echo in the Lanayru Temple. The devs also probably assumed most players would immediately echo everything they could. I know I did.
11:20 nah you don't need to wait, he's vulnerable the whole time.
26:36 can confirm, my partner beat Ganon with echoes because they didn't like the swordfighter form...it took a while longer
Same
Feeding the boss bomb fish is actually what I did during my 1. playthrough, because you can feed fire enemies to the plant heads to stun them. This gave me the idea to feed something else to the smooth heads, which in typically Zelda fashion is bombs!
25:29 personally I thought it was really obvious that this game has to take place really late into the downfall timeline. The reason why the Triforce is instead called the Prime Energy is that it's been so long that people straight up forgot what it was actually called.
You’re wrong about the Ganon lore details lmfao. Mad about lore you don’t even understand. This game clearly takes place after a link to the past based on, everything from the map. Ganon in this game is an echo of the ALTTP one.
People are supposing EoW takes place at the beginning just because we get more details from the creation myth. But the destroyed temples and the map expasion shows the opposite.
There are two main sets of evidence for the game's place in the timeline.
On the one hand, you have the Golden Goddesses still being present in the world, and being the ones giving out the three magic orbs that grant access to where the Triforce sleeps, the lack of any elemental dragons, light spirits, or other deputies left behind by the Goddesses to watch over Hyrule in their stead, and that Null has officially been creating rifts ever since the creation.
On the other hand, you have the map and landmarks matching up with LttP/LBW except for multiple structures being in ruins, and you have the blue pig demon echo who appears to be armed with Ganon's Trident.
Personally, I think it's easier to come up with excuses for why you'd have similar buildings in the same places (in fact, I have three - they rebuilt the ruined structures by the time of LttP; they built this game's structures based off knowledge of the future ones; both sets of buildings were built for the same purposes, so their location and appearance were dictated by the same mystical forces both times) than it is to come up with reasons why no-one knew about the Goddesses still hanging around, nor about the rifts continually opening and closing nor noticed the Might Crystals appearing everywhere.
It seems more plausible that people, on a long enough timescale, built the same buildings more than once, than that either the Goddesses and the creation happened more than once, or that rifts kept happening throughout the timeline without anyone noticing...
The blue pig demon Ganon form isn't exactly hard to explain away either - it doesn't exactly look like a red-haired man in black, so there's no reason Ganondorf had to have originated that form - it could work like the swordsman form in this game: some ancient Moblin chief or something wielded the Trident and, just like picking up the Sword of Might in this game gives Zelda access to Link's form, why shouldn't picking up the Trident give Ganondorf the form that becomes known as Ganon? It also fits well if you assume the Still World became the Sacred Realm, and the three Sanctions became the Spiritual Stones or Pendants or Pearls of other games.
It even lets the Prime Energy be named after Tri...
25:29 I would assume it actually took place very late in the timeline since Null had time to break free from its bindings, and that celestial knowledge has significantly degraded such that they do not even know the proper names for the artifacts. As for being before Orcarina of Time, the aesthetic to me suggests this is some time after Triforce of the Gods (Link to the Past), which would give Null plenty of opportunity to find another reincarnation of Ganon.
During my playthrough, I also thought that this game took place pre OoT, but I've since come to learn that it probably takes place some time after ALTTP. Considering that the overworld in EoW is heavily based on ALTTP, and you can even find the ruins of the Desert Palace + the inclusion of Ganon(not Ganondorf) I think pretty much confirms it at least takes place after OoT, very likely in the downfall timeline.
I don't think Scortchio is Condi's brother
In the spanish version, Tri sais "that wasn't Condi's brother after all" after defeating it. It could be a mistranslation, though
But, if in the ending he's returning with the hot air ballon, doesn't that imply he wasn't there for when the breach apeared? I don't think he was swallowed and echoed
Scortchio isn't Conde's brother, Conde thinks it's him cause it's been too long since he last saw him and this feeling of missing him make him mistake Scortchio for his brother, we know from the drawings Conde's brother actually look like him but a bit bigger and we indeed see him alive on his hot air balloon in the credits
@@KevZ7. Yeah, that too
This video taught me so many uses of bind I never thought of. In pretty much every combat application, I just used enemy echoes to fight them directly, and it worked out fine. Did not try using it on a single boss.
I didn’t know you could bind the arms the whole time I spammed lawnmowers
25:29 Someone told me about your complaint, so I had to respond. Everything is based on the premise that the Triforce was named after Tri. I never thought that was true. I thought the Triforce's was just lost to history by that point. Problem solved.
I never knew you could pull off nulls arm
I just attacks the arms with echoes the entire time
"Waterblocks truly are the key to every problem in this game"
I literally did not use them in any way you mentioned. Just because you found that you could drown enemies in them, that does not mean that everybody would come up with it nor that you had to use it at all.
Counter point, if the response to “this game mechanic is broken” is “then the player should choose to avoid it”, then why is it in the game at all? Don’t put stuff in your game and then tell players they’re the ones who should have known to avoid the mechanic you put in. If you don’t know how to design your game around the abilities you’re giving to the players, then don’t give them that ability.
@@Faint366I feel like it should change from "players should avoid it" to "players should not try to exploit it." It's fine to have some broken items in a game. But it would be a player's fault if they decide to water block over every part of the game and be like "man, there is not a lot to do around here."
@@Faint366there's such thing as self control
@@gwimbly519 if the game is only good if a mechanic is avoided then that mechanic should be put into the game
@@drooprtroopr6969 what part of using the walltula that the game gave me so that I can climb up walls to climb up a wall is “exploiting”?
A big problem I noticed that might make the game more fun is using different echos I mean every boss you just used swordfighter mode.
7:53 I’m 90% sure you can also just use the save right before the big pit to leave the pit after falling and skip it anyways
5:20 oh i just stood on the center platform and threw a ghost at both switches and a fish at the underwater one
I'm only past the Gerudo segment of the video but I have an observation.
Zelda has a huge variety of powerful tools, and just about every puzzle, obstacle, and combat encounter is trivial when those tools are applied.
The thing is that it's usually not immediately intuitive which echoes are best for a situation, or what way to use them. If you have it all figured out, it's a cakewalk; if you don't, it can be a struggle.
For example, I didn't know about the Water Block's powerful combat applications until I watched a speedrun utilize them when I was already on my second playthrough. I'd bet most players didn't figure that one out, at least not before scrapping for their life with at least one wizzrobe. I also dismissed them pretty quickly as a way to gain height, but I had my own answer to everything in the Platboom, which I used to skip Jabul Ruins like a boss.
Echo Ganon was the hardest fight in the game for me because I hadn't yet developed an understanding of how much damage different attacks dealt. A close second was Mogryph, which was a brutal struggle because I didn't realize it could be knocked out of its charge attack.
Given the placement of the statues in that arena, I bet most players DID figure out how to block Mogryph's dash, but let me tell you, I felt like a dang genius when I smacked him on his descent with a rising Platboom.
Puzzles are like that too. You fall into a rhythm where you use whatever handful of broken tools you picked to trivialize 90% of them, and then get stuck for a couple minutes on the last 10%.
Everything about Echoes of Wisdom's design is begging you to use a little brain power to break out of the default sequence and break the whole game. I do like that - I think it's perfect for Zelda. The one thing I'd critique is that I wish there were a few more truly challenging puzzles and encounters, that force Zelda to dig deeper into her kit - probably as optional content. But I don't really know how you'd design stuff that's truly a match for her abilities.
I don't have a super insightful conclusion, because I'm not very well-versed in puzzle design in games. I'm going to watch the rest of the video now.
But I suspect I found Gerudo Sanctum a lot more challenging than whatever dungeon you thought was the most challenging, simply because I didn't figure out the same things you did.
One big question that I have is, if you don't use Strantula or Platboom or Water Block or Reverse Bind Crawltula or Gustmaster or what have you to trivialize any situation where you need to gain height - what are you missing out on?
There's only so many configurations of beds, crates, trampolines, etc. And you'd probably stick to the same combination to ascend most ledges. And it would be trivial to reach the ledges in, say, the stealth section of Hyrule Castle.
It seems like to "make platforming interesting" in a traditional sense, you'd have to deny Zelda basically all her abilities and force her to rely on a specific strategy to make these sections "work". But I'm quite glad that, most of the game, Zelda is at max power and flying over gaps with the Floating Tile. Indeed, I found the Deku Jail to be perhaps the most frustrating segment in the game.
Again, I feel like challenges could be added - perhaps powerful Echoes are slow and more situations are time-bound. Or, more traps and surprises are set up to force you to improvise when one of your plans goes awry. But I think that on the whole, skipping this game's challenges and engaging with this game's challenges are one and the same.
While I'm writing an excessive amount here, I may as well add more.
I personally didn't mind how much health Echo Ganon had given his status as the "final boss" of the first half of the game (it turned it into a war of attrition, the only battle in the game that ran through my entire smoothie supply), but I can understand how that would be problematic. What's really amazing about the battle, though, is everything you experience when you don't solely exploit swordfighter form without exploring other options. Trying to position Echoes around his movement and Echo-erasing spinning blade was a ton of fun, as was using Bind to slam his blade back into himself before he could get away. Dead Man's Volley offers a choice: expend a chunk of swordfighter gauge you might need later for big damage (and gamble on executing the volley correctly), or kite the attack around and try to get what damage you can with your Echoes? Echo Ganon is - and I should give it some time to account for recency bias - a top 5 Zelda boss for me now (I've played 6 Zelda games).
Conversely, I had a distaste for the room you (or should I say "the video", given how deep I've buried this take) praised at 27:18. First, I assumed the frost geyser would extinguish the fire orb and avoided it immediately, so I didn't learn you could turn the fire orb into an ice orb until the final puzzle. Then, I was at a loss for what to do, because I didn't spot the Small Key for the longest time. And finally, I had no need to re-freeze the room to get around the fire geysers, because a little Platboom magic got me through just fine. In other words, I didn't engage with the puzzle at all because I had a solid understanding of powerful tools I could use for puzzle-skipping.
Whether or not something is challenging or trivial in Echoes of Wisdom really comes down to what the player knows how to do. Things are more challenging, and often more fun, when they don't know what they're doing. What each individual player figures out or not will be wildly different (you can bind chests!?). Your reward for figuring out the broken stuff - or having a bajillion salted milk smoothies I suppose - is trivialized challenges. That's a double-edged sword, but like I said - aside from some more challenging situations here and there (stuff that forces improv), I wouldn't want Echoes of Wisdom to be anything else, and I wouldn't want Zelda's toolkit to be any less broken.
18:40 Interesting thing is that Volvagia seems to encourage the use of Swordfighter Bombs and other explosives to speed up breaking the crystal. Not only do bombs and explosives immediately detonate on contact with lava/lava floors, they demolish the crystal in about 2-3 explosions. Not to mention that the instant explosions give bombs and explosives really good DPS on Volvagia's down phases.
You can also rip the crystal off with bind.
25:29 This is making a lot of assumptions. You're saying just because we hear the retelling of the creation of the world, and the fact the residents of Hyrule seem to not know what the Triforce is, that this must be the beginning of the timeline. But there's nothing physically here that actually proves that, and instead everything physical, such as the existence of Ganon and the formation of the world being incredibly similar to ALTTP and ALBT, show that it can't be anywhere near the beginning of the timeline. It's entirely likely that the Triforce has just been forgotten to time, or that this is one of the timelines where the Triforce just isn't as well documented as it is in the others (I've seen that the Child Timeline is a good example of this, as Ganondorf just magically gets the Triforce and then it just vanishes with him at the end of TP). We've even seen the Triforce still be present and yet forgotten in more modern games; its insignia is present all over the Hyrule of BOTW and TOTK, but nobody ever mentions it by name, and it isn't the magic macguffin everyone's after anymore. TLDR: There is no reason you should assume this takes places near the beginning of the timeline, and more than enough physical reasons to believe it takes place further down than most others.
30:15 i think thats totally fair but if you think using the shotgun is cheap and makes the encounter boring, then there's literally nothing stopping upu from just not using it
I hated the Ice Dunegon when I went through it, mostly because I didn't realize that you can change the Orbs until the END. Which means I had to go through several Puzzles without knowing that i can change the Fire Orb into an Ice Orb to Freeze some of the Rooms, it was pretty frustrating to say the least.
Omg I made the same mistake. I hate how the only way to figure it out is to mess up. I had to use a tutorial for the last puzzle
You can freeze and unfreeze rooms? I somehow didn't encounter this in my play through.
@@bobre-re5voHow did you get the boss key then?
@@mariorockysonicmegasochjag I meant that I didn't encounter this during the temple until the boss key. My bad😣
You can pull the arms on the final fight to instantly destroy them??? I just thought it was normal to just spam the arms with attacks to destroy them, i wondered why that fight took so long.
So game design is difficult. Mostly because people don’t agree on what is good and bad gameplay. Traditional Zelda dungeons were fun but once you know the gimmick it’s easy or super frustrating depending on if you’re good at the gimmick. On this one even if you know the gimmick you can try different ways to do things meaning each play through can be different as can each players experience. I rarely used the strandulla or water block not because I forced myself not to but because it wasn’t the first thing to come to mind. I miss traditional dungeons but the flip side is I actually beat tears of the kingdom and breath of the wild and echoes of wisdom relatively quickly instead of taking forever and having to restart because I forgot what was going on.
30:13 I'm sorry I have to break down this because it is just a bad way to explain things. If you remove the "deathmatch" of things, because in Zelda contexte, you don't play for your fucking life, the exemple ended as "a match against a WWE fighter, you WILL pick the shotgun" and that's just wrong. If you absolutely want to win no matter the way, yeah you will take the shotgun, but if you want to deserve your win, to do things challenging, or heck if you are a WWE fighter yourself, you will absolutely not taking that shotgun.
Back to Zelda, if you want the game to be challenging, if you want to feel satisfaction going forward, yes you can totally ignore the cloud/water blocks of you don't find satisfactions in games. To break down the exemple of the WWE fighter, I mention a scenario where you're a WWE fighter yourself too, we can translate that to being a long time Zelda player: shotgun/cloud are for beginners who just want to end the challenge no matter the way, taking the fights with your bare hand/finding another solution than cheesing with clouds is for a WWE fighter/a long time Zelda player.
And also, at some point you mentionned the last "dungeon" with a mix of every environments etc. that you can just cheese with cloud, and said "why bother when you can just skip?" This is an extremely bad take. Why bothering playing the game if you can just watch the end on youtube? You will tell me that if when you boot up the game for the first time and there was a button "end of the game" right in the menu, you will not play the full game because "why bothering, if you can do that". I think the whole problem come from what you said at the end, that you thinks it's boring to make your journey yourself and find your own solution, and you don't understand why bothering finding a solution if you can cheese with op echoes. I really suggest you to change this mindset if you want to enjoy EoW more. I can get it's frustrating, because you can feel like you're losing your time, but honestly if you're so negative about cloud and water blocks, I bet you're not having fun using them, and so if you're not having fun, you are losing your time anyway. Game are made to be fun, and if you have to force yourself to not doing something even if the game let you do for having fun, that's totally okay. Personally I find that even more satisfying. There are some rooms in the game that I cheesed with water or cloud and I was like "no, I can do it otherwise, that's lame" and I restart the room without water or cloud this time, and it's way more satisfying, you're litterally telling the game that even if you have easy ways to do it, you are the one who decide how you will go forward, thanks to the freedom that same game gives you.
So yes, "don't like it, don't use it" is a valid argument, like it or not. If you have multiple solutions in the game, you are totally free to pick up the one you like the most, and that's the must fun to your eyes.
Anyway, great video as usual with perfect editing, I hope I didn't feel mean in my comment, that's not my goal at all, I just absolutely don't agree with you and I letting you know, that's it. And sorry if my english isn't good, I'm not english.
So anyway 2, take care and can't wait to see your future videos!
See, this is why i LOVE Zelda dungeons, they get kinda creative with their approach to dungeon layouts. Me, personally, ive once or twice tried thinking about some unique dungeon ideas of my very own and among the best i could come up with was an Aztec style dungeon that pretty much became a giant pinball machine with you, traversing each room in a rolling cage, as the ball itself. The boss would be what i would describe as a " Demonic one-eyed centipede that takes refuge within a giant slot machine at the center end of the boss room" that you could only damage by getting matching symbols on its reels to deal it massive damage somehow. This dungeon idea is a work in progress.
40:50 I fully disagree. This is actually my favorite part of the game, you have almost infinite ways of solving the puzzle and it's up to how creative you are to figure them out.
30:11 IMO, this analogy falls flat when applied to this game. Mostly because I had a different experience playing it than what was described in your video, and I was still achieving the same results. It was a mix of "I didn’t even think of that" and "why didn’t you do this instead?"
I like the water temple.
I fell down the pit, warped back, jumped over the hole, then climbed up to the boss door, didnt hack the key so i went back to look for it, took the first door to the right, found the key and fought the boss.
the triforce being called prime energy doesnt necessarily mean it takes place in the past, it could just as easily mean it takes place in a future where the name of the triforce was lost to time.
12:27 "it's really not that hard" *proceeds to fuck up the jump*
I actually barely used the water blocks to skip platforming, but I did use the yellow platform enemy to do basically the same thing, so yeah
The water blocks aren't the only broken platforming thing haha
I just assumed that water blocks could only be placed next to existing water, so I never used them to break platforming. Though platforming seemed broken enough anyway with beds and then clouds.
4:56 THATS THE SOLUTION?! I spent soooo long trying to get up their with bed and platfoom parkour I feel sooo dumb
I didn't like the Faron Temple that much. I'm not a fan of dark sections in video games, and the boss fight was really annoying for me to fight. The Lanayru Temple on the other hand is honestly one of the best Zelda dungeons in my opinion.
I had no idea you could rip off Nulls arms lmao...
Honestly, a lot of the times you said, "You have to do x" you did something I never did lol!
25:28 your first mistake was caring about the timeline and story at all
almost every zelda game contradicts every other zelda game. also youre just wrong too. the triforce was named in skyward sword, so it being called the prime energy is just an odd choice that can be chalked up to echoes of wisdom being set in an intellectual dark age of hyrule. its also implied canon that ganon reincarnates at this point too. echoes of wisdom could be at almost any point in the timeline and itd make the same level of sense. because the devs dont care about zeldas overarching story
6:33 your solution here is solving a problem that never even existed, I really love it. You can just... jump down in the water, swim down, bind the torch pedestal, and go back up. But your solution is much funnier
I did the whole Faron temple without the dungeon map (it was the last thing I got before the boss key)
re: ganon's inclusion, there's substantial evidence in the game world that echoes takes place after alttp
Hey, I think that interesting side effect of your dungeon review is that you did not account for certain play styles.
When you were talking about the tallus boss, you said that you absolutely had to use bind to pull the rock off of its head. I never even did that. I just used crows because they were flying enemies.
Additionally, I didn't even know the bind dark nut trick. Or that you could kill deku babas with it
I'm generally pleased with the dungeons in this game
I used a lot of water blocks but i dont think you can blame it for being "too powerfull" when so many other absurd (sometimes even better) options there are. You unlock Platboom pretty early on and it already gives you so much height, more than what water blocks can do for a loong time... You can use mole holes to insta kill enemies just like water blocks, and they cant even break it.... And tile was my most used echo for a reason, it completely trivialises every horizontal gap ever, with the black spider triviliazing almost every vertical gap
You can even fly infinetly with tiles too (tho its easier if you have 6 triangles, that is really lategame)
Yeah, i do think water blocks are a really versitile and strong option, but if you were not trivializing puzzles using water blocks, you'd be trivializing then using tiles, Platboom, spiders, cloud etc... And if you were not trivilizing combat using water blocks, you'd be using mole holes, trowing enemies in the void, or spamming the samey enemies you do every time... (combat is not the strong part of this game lets be honest)
I do think its a general issue with the game, but i dont think its fair to blame/penalize any specific echo for that, its the design of the game in general
38:08 I discovered during this fight that you can actually target their weakpoint, so I got in a pattern of using bomb fish to stun, targeting their weakpoint and spawning a lizalfos, which makes the AI only go for the weakpoint, then grabbing the head with bind to hold it still for the lizalfos, worked really well!
What even is a traditional Zelda dungeon, and what was the last game that had such?
22:26 i did not even think of using bind here, and you can hit all weak spots without bind. The shoulder one is easy after his slam, and the head one you can jump at his hands after the slam and then jump hit him.
Same here. When he did his slam, I put Deku Baba's on his hands and had them chomp away.
About the note on 25:28: This game takes place after ALBW/TFH (in those games it's the same hero for both games and era). Think about the whole game as an era that is so distant from those games that people forgot Ganon's name, the name of the Triforce and much more. It's a very distant moment in time and too far away from all what happened after OoT, ALttP, Oracle of S/A, ALBW and TFH. The kingdom has not been yet reduced to a tiny country as it is shown in Zelda 1 and 2.
7:43 welcome back Diggernaut from Samus Returns, my beloved.
Yo PJiggles, I know this ain’t related to the video, but did you know that the smoke effect that surrounds a fighter in Smash Ultimate can go away after a certain amount of time? It’s like an hour and apparently swap characters like Pokémon Trainer and Aegis will reset the timer, kinda, whenever you swap with them, and yes, this is for sure a real thing, this isn’t made up, and to anyone reading this who doesn’t believe me, then go in training and make the game speed x2 and wait until the smoke effect disappears by itself, you’ll be surprised and have a nice day to whoever read all this
Barely used the water block. Platboom was my echo of choice.
I know your argument water is "just don't use it if you have a problem," but I see it as more of an accessibility option. Zelda especially this one is geared for more all ages, so if a little kid can spawn a lot of water blocks and solve the puzzle he's gonna have a great time. For older Zelda fans like us, we can use that solution but I feel as if they left it there for that younger audience. And then the other echoes I feel like give you such a wider freedom of expression in how you approach things; if you like platbooms use the platbooms, but someone else might like using the box and decorative tree.
Idk I don't get the point you're trying to make where there should only be 1 solution to solve a puzzle. Imagine in Mario Odyssey if there was only 1 solution on how to get a moon, that would feel so so restrictive. And same with Zelda sometimes there are 1 solution, but the more options the player has to more accessible it is to everyone
Little kids played the older, more restrictive Zeldas just fine...
@@emperortgp2424 it was fine but now it is better, it's an evolution in level design to have choices. They make it for more accessibility (more people of all ages playing) and replayability, more fun out of it because you can comeback and think another solution, where before there was just one. That is key for creativity.
you can actually hit the mole boss at any time in the fight, especially witht he bow that you get in that dungeon
9:25 the problem with this issue is that you find the final statue very late in the dungeon and the final clue comes right after it so you’re not gonna have much of a reason to go back and “brute force” the puzzle if the other hint is literally right there and missing it will be difficult if you’re trying to explore the whole dungeon.
The sand thing covering the boss key and door was a weird nitpick
And as others have mentioned, you absolutely do not need to wait around for the boss to rush at you to attack him. You have arrows and can damage him with echoes too
The mole boss was the hardest boss in the game for me because I didn't know to use statues and he one shot every echo
as i found out on my first playthrough you can skip the big bars at the start of faron temple by just spawning a pathblade in the right spot
I skipped that part using an iceblock and that wind generating enemy. Literally the only puzzle in the game where solving it felt satisfying because you actually have to think outside the box (or rather, water block) and use underutilized echoes for an underutilized interaction. Too bad it's not mandatory.
16:42 So, for this puzzle, I literally just ran into the geysers on the ceiling and toughed my way through them. Painful but worth it.
Regarding Mogryph, when he's in phase 2 you can also stun him with a statue during the attack where you dives into the sand while flying so there are multiple attacks which let you stun him. You still have to wait but it's not as bad as having to wait for just one single attack.
You don't actually need to stun him first to make him vulnerable, because he was never impervious to attacks in the first place.
I actually don't think water is the best echo to gain height. Yes it will work in the vast majority of cases (95%), but Platboom also works. When you have the frog bracelet to be able to jump on it directly, you're set for the game. You get more height than by stacking water, and much quicker too. Goated echo, it was my most used by the end of the game
Volvagia was always easy to hit with my sword personally, i just placed some big rocks to get closer. Though i agree it has too much health and no real phase 2 is dumb
I think a simple solution to the freedom of being able to do what you want would be to have the still world function like how you mentioned shrines prevent you from spawning devices. Once you enter the still world, Tri’s power will be diminished, and will lose the ability to summon echoes you’ve previously learned. When you’re in the still world you can only use echoes that are available to collect in that specific area of where the rift is. This you can’t summon water blocks or clouds in other dungeons or areas of the still world.
I think our lists are basically identical, maybe swapping Hyrule Castle and Suthorn Ruins. While I still enjoyed the dungeons more than anything else BotW/TotK had to offer, I agree that the "unlimited freedom" combined with really broken echoes kinda made a lot of dungeons (and other areas of the game) trivial. I almost lucked out in that I did the Zora one last of that bunch (getting the water block later), and the Lanayru one last of that bunch (getting the cloud echo last). But even then, yeah, so many things trivialized the game, I really hope in the future they reel it back a bit and make, like... ACTUAL puzzles lmfao
Also yeah, the fact that you can skip Jabul Ruins almost entirely with water blocks even further brings home how bad it is lol
You can actually stun Mogryph on his way down if you put a statue underneath him, but as another commenter pointed out, you don’t even need to stun him to damage him
I'll be honest, sometimes I forget I even have an echo that could have trivialized a puzzle and end up going a whole roundabout solution. Likewise when I first finished the game I didn't even know you could pull Null's arms to expose the weak points for Link to destroy, I just spammed enemies and that ended up working fine despite taking longer. Sometimes the obvious solutions aren't as obvious at first glance, and that's very likely due to Echoes of Wisdom's extremely open toolkit, you just don't always think about the "best" solution and rather those that work just as well. I do agree though, the water block and to an extent flying tile does trivialize exploration quite a bit. Beds also notoriously make the game very easy due to being an easily accessible way to restore hearts without spending any resources other than time, the only time I used beds during a boss fight though is in the Volvagia fight, as the boss spends a lot of time doing pretty much nothing.
Tying into this, that puzzle where you pulled the shield off a statue in Suthorn Ruins, I completely forgot about. You can imagine what this entails, but I was able to beat the game without that knowledge.
8:00 also, unlike every other sequence in the game where you're 'forced' to do something, you can just... warp back to the top of the room and skip it after falling down.
A few things wrong here:
1) I've never encountered ANY criticism over TOTK/BOTW letting the player find their own solution. On the contrary, I've heard tons of praise for this. And I think it's a great direction to go. Have an intended solution but let players find their own methods to puzzles.
2) Jabul ruins is great because you can sequence break a lot, to the point where if you know which room has the boss key, you can go ahead, grab it, and go straight to the boss. It's a really fun dungeon to replay.
3) That bomb wall you complained about in Eldin isn't an issue if you just build a platform.
4) You complain about having to shoot the crystal on Volvagia then immediately afterwards say "oh you can bind it to pull it off faster". You made it more tedious for yourself. As for her health stat being too high, when you can't reach her with your sword, you're expected to throw bombs.
5) Not sure where you got "this game takes place extremely early in the timeline" from. The fact that the Triforce is called the Prime Energy could simply be that it happens so far in the future that the name "Triforce" has been forgotten. Besides, Triforce is what the people of Hyrule call it. I think this is the first time it's explicitely been mentioned by the Goddesses since you rarely get to speak to them. So it could be that that's the "true" name of the triforce. Common theories place this either on fallen timeline (because of the similarities to the LTTP/LBW map) or child timeline. Not sure why you decided it was early timeline, and despite so much evidence pointing to the contrary, decided to stick with that instead of considering you may have been wrong.
6) Feeding bombs to the miniboss in Faron Temple is 100% the intended way, given that you're taught to feed bombs to Deku Babas if you don't pull their heads, and it's also the intended way to fight it in the Oracles games (which is where the boss is pulled from).
The multiple Dekubaba headed boss is actually from Zelda 1. The Oracle bosses revived a lot of Zelda 1 bosses
@@geschnitztekiste4111 even better. I'm not familiar with the fight there but I'm willing to bet it uses bombs too
16:59, I first played the game in hero mode. Hearts don't happen in that mode, the more content I watch of this game the more honestly surprised how much easier the game is off of hero mode.
For the faron boss key plant you forgot to mention the mushrooms that were shown to decay when away from the plant which is how i found the key both times
20:05 My roommate decided to play Wind Waker for the first time and beat Dragon Roost Yesterday. I always thought the same thing, that the dungeon’s puzzles were pretty limited and trivial, and I figured that since she beat BOTW, TOTK, and EoW, she’d have no problem breezing through it, but those puzzles really did give her some trouble. I think Dragon Roost is trickier than we Zelda veterans give it credit for, like yeah the puzzles are limited but a lot of them are based on looking in unexpected parts of the environment. It’s a lot better of a tutorial dungeon than people give it credit for, ya know?
About the "ganon" thing. Yeah, i understand the problem. But to be fair, Null does summon stuff he did not absorv throughout the game. Most bosses were not absorved, they were just echoes we never even see the "real thing" (like gohma, it doesnt seem gohma was even in faron before the rifts show up). But yeah, the payoff of ganon in this hame is kinda boring (tho who am i to say, i actually really like Ganondorfs appearance in TotK)
So with the Ganon fight, the first phase is thrust attacks, second phase he switches to fire-bats and trident throw, third phase replaces the trident throw with dead mans volley and alternates its use with the fire-bats, and for the final phase he brings back every moves and speeds them up slightly.
42:40 if it wasn't for the clouds navigating the map would be a pain in the ass, adding the clouds in the game is actually good design. As I mentioned before it's obvious that their intention was not to make vertical movement the main feature of the game
According to what I saw in a speed run video, you don't even have to attack the null section in the water, you just have to wait for him to reach the end, and the enemies he throws at you don't hurt you.
Do you know the Boss Keys-series? They make diagrams of every Zelda dungeon in terms of how the keys and locked doors all fit. A more complex layout then hints at a more complex dungeon. If you would do the same for the dungeons in this game, almost all of their diagrams would basically boil down to a straight line with very small detours to get the corresponding keys. The only dungeon that deviates from that and creates a more complex layout is Faron Temple. Which I think is exactly why it feels so far above the rest.
Not gonna lie I completely forgot about the cloud echo like 2 seconds after I got it, so I never used it.
12:42, Play Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon, it’s basically a co-op Zelda game.
Its amazing! Ive never seen controlerworks like that!
Super underrated game
25:29 No, you're so right. I was SO into placing this game before TMC but the fact that Ganon's here makes it outright impossible which is extremely tragic to me
Not only can you skip the first area in the water temple on a second playthough when you know, you can even skip it the first time. You can just build water blocks back up to the transition and hop back out, which is what I did
18:40 in regards to this boss, the intention is actually to use bombs I think. They explode still when hitting the lava, and deal way more damage. I defeated them rather quickly
Funny, I basically never used water blocks after the stilled area lol
I mostly abused the bed and trampoline, until I got the yellow platform monster and the flying tiles.
42:30 water does freeze at hebra mountain, just where it's windy.
Like I get that zelda didn't have a sword and she's like a mage or whatever but swords like... exist?? I can't even beat people up with the staff? like brother im confused. like IDK give her a spear if swords are really only link's thing.
I agree with Faron so much. Its the first open dungeon that feels like a dungeon IMO.
I also ended exploring the whole temple before fighting Manhandla.
The greatest sin of Volvagia is that even when you know the "trick" to beating it, the fight doesn't actually get faster or more interesting.
My first playthrough, I struggled with Mogryph cause I didn't think to use statue echoes in his second phase and just chalked him up as a damage sponge. Once I learned that-and in repeat fights used Roboblin for his tornado attack-he became significantly better and more fun to fight.
I thought you NEEDED to shock Gohma's crystals while she was on the wall until I rubbed my two braincells together and shot her eye, and later I improved my strategy even more by using Roboblin to cover her eggs and tack on extra damage if I keep him safe-I even made the crystals part easier with clever usage of Drippitune + electric echoes. Now she's my favorite boss!
Nothing truly helps Volvagia: pulling on the necklace helps stagger her, but she still takes at least 3 minutes to defeat, and even strong echoes like Wizzrobes and Lizalfos Lv. 3 don't make her better.
Side note: I actually really like that Jabul Ruins is hella cheesable lol. With most dungeons, the cheese is pretty light all things considered, so it's just really funny where one dungeons entire identity is cheese. Considering it's very easy to get the Crawltula echo prior, and you get the water block during, it definitely feels intentional for better or worse. At least it gives it a little more personality than Gerudo Sanctum imo, better boss aside.