Posing As Link: How Zelda Surrenders Her Own Voice

Echoes of Wisdom Abandons Invention in Favor of Familiarity

When The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was first revealed, the gaming community erupted with excitement. This was the moment so many fans had been waiting for—a mainline Zelda game where, for the first time, you could play as Zelda herself. Not a side character, not a princess hoping to be rescued, but Zelda as the protagonist in a real, core entry in the franchise. It felt like a victory for inclusion and for those who had long dreamed of stepping into her shoes and taking on her perspective in an epic adventure.

On the surface, Echoes of Wisdom seems to offer everything fans could want. The art style is instantly familiar, almost directly lifted from the Link’s Awakening remake. The game’s linear structure and dungeon-based design stand in stark contrast to the wide-open worlds of modern Zelda titles, clearly aiming to capture the feel of the franchise’s classic entries. Zelda’s main power—summoning clones of objects and enemies she encounters on her journey—is finely tuned and crafted with care, making it ideal for solving clever, bespoke puzzles. In many ways, this game delivers exactly what players have been asking for: a return to the “classic” Zelda formula, something the franchise hasn’t seen since 2013’s A Link Between Worlds. Yet, it’s this very desire to replicate the ideal, familiar version of Zelda that holds Echoes of Wisdom back from achieving any meaningful impact.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “pose”—a term I came across in an essay by Stephen Marche about the novelist Sally Rooney. In that essay, Marche describes what he calls the “literature of the pose,” a kind of writing that’s more concerned with appearing correct than with true expression. It’s writing that is precise, polished, careful not to make mistakes, but in doing so, it loses something essential. Marche writes, “The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes. Its foremost gesture is erasure and its foremost subject is social anxiety and self-presentation.”

This idea of the “pose” stuck with me as I played Echoes of Wisdom, because that’s exactly what the game feels like. It’s posing as a Zelda game, going through all the right motions, checking off all the nostalgic boxes. The art, the dungeons, the linearity—these are the things that Zelda fans claim to love about the older games. And yet, in its meticulous effort to be a Zelda game, Echoes of Wisdom feels hollow. The game never fully loses itself in the adventurous, innovative spirit that defines the best Zelda titles. It’s as if it’s afraid to take risks, afraid to make mistakes, afraid to take advantage of any of its new elements simply because they are different from what we think a Zelda game should be.

Let’s look again at Echoes of Wisdom and what it means to play as Zelda. This is not the vibrant, fully-realized character we’ve come to know in recent games. Instead, the developers chose to make her a silent protagonist, just like Link. And in that silence—where her personality should shine—there’s an emptiness, a missed opportunity. Zelda, a symbol of wisdom and power, is stripped of her voice. The game offers no insight into her thoughts, no reactions to the world around her. She becomes, like Link, a blank slate.

Worse still, much of the game hides Zelda under a hood and cape, erasing her identity. She moves through the world not as the princess we know, but as an anonymous figure. Her royal status, her history—everything that makes her Zelda—is ignored. There’s no friction, no tension between her and the world that knows her. Instead, she moves like any nameless adventurer. What should have marked a bold departure, an exploration of Zelda’s unique perspective, is reduced to an aesthetic choice. She may be Zelda in name, but functionally, she’s posing as Link.

Some might argue that Zelda redefines the series with her new powers. The ability to summon clones of enemies and objects is novel, sure, but there’s nothing inherently Zelda about it. We’ve seen Link perform equally wild feats—flying through roofs, gluing together objects, reversing time. There’s nothing here that Zelda alone brings to the table. And confirming this, Echoes gives her an ultimate power: the ability to transform into a blue hero, wielding a sword, shooting arrows, throwing bombs—essentially, becoming Link. Her greatest ability, the one tied to a finite resource, is the power to pose as someone else.

When I say Echoes of Wisdom performs the role of a Zelda game, this is what I mean. It promises something new, something revolutionary, but in the end, it falls back on what’s familiar. It hides behind the mechanics of a traditional Zelda game, reducing Zelda to little more than a stand-in for Link.

There’s something unsettling about how much of Echoes of Wisdom is given a pass because it leans so heavily on what is familiar. For many fans, this crutch of familiarity seems to obscure the game’s weaknesses. Take, for example, one of Zelda’s early encounters with her new magical companion, Tri. They come across a gigantic rock, an obstacle clearly designed to block their path forward. Without hesitation, Tri explains that they possess an ability perfect for this situation, and suddenly, Zelda can use Tri as a kind of tractor beam—lifting and moving any unfixed object with ease. 

This moment bothers me in a way I’m still unpacking—maybe in a way that says more about my own expectations than the game itself—but it feels hollow. There’s no scaffolding leading up to this. The need for this power doesn’t emerge from the world or the narrative. It’s simply dropped in when the plot demands it, a convenient solution to a problem we didn’t know we had. The tractor beam doesn’t transform the way we understand the world around us. It’s not a tool of discovery or reinvention; it’s just a means to an end. A fancy key, no different from bombs or boots in previous Zelda games, designed to get us through the specific barriers that require its use.

What bothers me most isn’t even the convenience of it all—it’s the way we, as players, are so willing to accept it. The second Tri tells us we can move this giant rock, we go along with it, never questioning why or how this power exists in the first place. It’s not a moment. It’s just the game saying, “Enough time has passed, here’s your next ability.” Worse, it doesn’t build on the larger Echoes concept that’s supposedly at the heart of this game. It’s just a tractor beam.

But why are players so accepting of this? I think it’s because of Tears of the Kingdom. In that game, Link has access to the Ultra Hand ability, a green tractor beam that lets him manipulate objects in much the same way. So now, because it’s familiar, we’re ready to give it a pass. It’s part of the Zelda lexicon now, and in Echoes of Wisdom, it’s allowed to exist without being questioned. The game is dressing itself in the trappings of a Zelda experience, performing the motions of what we expect, and that familiarity smooths over what should be questioned. Instead of a moment of revelation, of dramatic impact, we’re given something that feels like a placeholder, a nod to what has come before. We accept it not because it’s meaningful, but because it’s familiar.

In posing as something recognizable, as something belonging to the Zelda canon, the game avoids the responsibility of making this moment significant. It’s content with being a mimic, knowing that mimicry alone will be enough to satisfy most players. And that’s the problem—it’s enough to satisfy, but not to inspire.

This lack of inspiration seeps into every corner of Echoes of Wisdom. The plot, for all its promise of centering Zelda, does little to make her feel essential. Time and again, I was left wondering whether the events of the game would have unfolded in the exact same way had Zelda never spoken to a single NPC. Take, for example, the supposed feud between the River and Ocean Zora. After a brief detour, it is resolved simply by placing both parties in the same room. No tension, no stakes, just proximity. Later, a Gerudo impersonator accuses you of being a bad actor, as though the game is trying to be clever, only for the accusation to fizzle out when your task remains the same: clear the rift that envelops the area. Clearing rifts is all you do in Echoes of Wisdom, yet the characters persist in talking around the obvious, as if their dialogue might add something new. But nothing ever does. It’s chatter without meaning. They speak, you listen, but the journey remains unchanged.

What makes this so frustrating isn’t just the repetition; it’s the refusal to do anything interesting with the world or its inhabitants. When the characters eventually learn that the hooded figure they’ve been interacting with is Princess Zelda, it lands with a resounding thud. Nobody seems to care. When Tri, Zelda’s companion, becomes visible to those around them, the shift is met with a shrug. These moments, which could have been ripe with significance, are passed over without any acknowledgment of their potential weight. The game performs a surface-level version of itself, going through the motions of what we expect from a Zelda game, without any real engagement or depth. It’s a phony performance of something once beloved, relying on nostalgia to cover for the lack of substance.

And that’s where the true fault lies: the familiarity. Echoes of Wisdom poses as a classic Zelda game, relying on our recognition of the Zora, the Gerudo, the Gorons, and the Deku Scrubs to create the illusion of meaning. But the game is little more than a series of recognizable faces and places, empty of the weight they once carried. The Zora feud is meaningless because it asks nothing of us. The Gerudo impersonation is hollow because our actions were never really in question. We move from one task to the next, never truly shaping the world or its story. And yet, because we know these elements, because they feel familiar, we inject meaning where there is none.

In the end, Echoes of Wisdom collapses under the weight of its own pose. It performs the motions of a Zelda game without ever truly embodying one. Familiarity is a powerful thing—it can smooth over flaws and disguise emptiness, but it cannot create depth where none exists. And that’s what this game lacks. For all its echoes of the past, it never rises above them to offer something new. It settles for being a shadow of what came before, content to wear the costume of a Zelda game without the soul that made the franchise what it is.

And the saddest part? The players let it. We accepted the pose because it looked enough like the real thing. But beneath the surface, Echoes of Wisdom is just that: an echo, faint and hollow, of something far greater. It’s a game that could have been more but chose, instead, to rest in the comfort of what we already know, too afraid or too indifferent to ask for anything more. And, honestly, I couldn’t think of anything less Zelda.

Thanks for reading all that.