GAME CLEAR No. 305 -- The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

2026-07-15 19:39:58 video games game clear zelda nintendo grezzo switch

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (2024, Switch)

Developer: Nintendo, GREZZO
Publisher: Nintendo
Clear Version: Switch
Clear Platform: Switch 2
Clear Date: 7/15/26

Why should I care?
Echoes of Wisdom’s object-cloning mechanic mostly delivers as a good bit of fun, and it’s a great excuse to return to the brilliant look, feel, and engine of the Link’s Awakening remake.

Old Man, take a look at my life

Here at the Nixon Computer, I’ve often insisted that GAME CLEAR posts are not reviews. At least not as a rule. Practically speaking, though, the overwhelming majority of them basically are. Not this time. I’m gonna write about my late father for this one. This post will spoil some significant story developments involving a member of the supporting cast of Echoes of Wisdom. If you care about that, skip this post or I guess read it after you’ve played this game up through the part that takes place at Eldin Volcano.

For a little background, Echoes of Wisdom is unique among Nintendo-developed and published Zelda games inasmuch as it actually stars its title character as its protagonist and playable character. Pretty neat! Eldin Volcano and its resident Goron race of guys are familiar sights throughout the series and return in this one.

It’s about halfway up Eldin Volcano at Goron City where Zelda first meets the Gorons and eventually their new chief, Darston. The lad is young by the looks of him, and he’s awfully unsure of himself. Making matters worse, he and his people are dealing with a crisis as an interdimensional rift has opened up across their mountain and swallowed up swathes of its land and people, including the village Elders. A tough task for a young Chief! Fortunately, Zelda and her floating friend Tri have become experts at mending such rifts.

Young Darston is glad to have help but is also determined to prove himself as Chief. Bits of dialog hint at Darston’s promotion to the hereditary title being the result of his father’s untimely demise. He’s described by himself and others as booksmart but frequently paralyzed by worry and fear. He wants desperately to be like the headstrong, confident, capable, and venerated Chief his father was. For this reason, he is always found clutching and consulting a tablet containing the late Chief’s 56 Nuggets of Wisdom.

My dad was born Michael Alan Anderson on October 17th, 1960, in Birmingham, Alabama. I knew him as a tall and confident man who took shit from no one and excelled in his field. All the while, he maintained an excellent sense of humor. He loved Auburn football, golf, skiing, and classic rock. He hated ass kissers, Republicans, and the Alabama Crimson Tide. Above all, he was a provider who loved his family, and he went to exceptional lengths to wrest custody of me and my sister from our drunk and abusive mother. Not the least of those efforts was, in fact, getting sober himself in 1999 and never relapsing. He knew he had to for us to have a chance. It is partially in tribute to that remarkable feat that I’ve never partaken of alcohol myself.

I lost my dad on January 22nd, 2019. Heart attack. No warning. He was 58, and I was 25. People have lost their fathers younger and more tragically. But not one of those passings has severed a tighter father-son bond. Of that I can assure you.

Like Darston, if there was a way I outdid my father by traditional metrics, it was in the classroom. My grades were better, my college was more prestigious. I thrived academically.

Like Darston, I also don’t know what the hell I’m doing now. It is no small consolation to me that my dad is not here to see me floundering and treading water ten years into a career I hate with no fucking clue how I’m going to do it for thirty more.

Like Darston, it is my dad’s unyielding love that produced me and that will see me through.

As he accompanies Zelda and Tri, the young Goron Chief repeatedly consults his tablet of 56 pieces of advice to help them on their way. Silly stuff like “You can’t lead from the back!” (26) or the surprisingly apt “A breakdown can lead to a breakthrough!” (34) inspire him to overcome relevant fears or resolve ostensible impasses.

At the end of their travels together, Darston’s little character arc resolves predictably but palatably. He realizes that he doesn’t need to be exactly like his father to be a competent leader. His father’s teachings guided him, but his own ingenuity was ultimately key in helping Zelda and Tri. To clear a path for the latter two, he drives his precious graven tablet into a crack in a boulder, destroying both. He no longer needs it (and besides, he’s memorized it).

This is where he and I part ways. I would never do that to the words my father left behind for me.

For years as I was growing up, my dad would impart bits of wisdom upon me. Some sincere, some tongue-in-cheek, many both. He often joked that he was going to write a book containing these sayings, remarks, memories, and bits of advice to give to me some day. I found out in the days following his death that he was not, in fact, joking.

While working remotely from my childhood home in my dad’s home office, upstairs from where his urn had recently been placed, I took a break from the work I could hardly do to sift through his personal effects. I found an unremarkable-looking journal in one drawer and flipped it open. I thumbed through it, reading the Old Man’s takes and aphorisms written in his handwriting. Faced with a moment that topped the bitter/sweet index of my life by orders of magnitude, I cried uncontrollably. The book’s pages are mostly empty. Tucked inside the front cover is a loose note containing brief descriptions of other bits he’d have liked to have included. Nevertheless, that part that was written comprises maybe two dozen cherished representations of the relationship we had. I have no idea when he had planned to give it to me, but I have it now. It is my most prized possession even if, to this day, it is almost searingly painful to consider opening again.

So, yes. I saw a lot of myself in the poor boy clinging tightly to the memory of his father and wishing desperately that he could be him.

I’m fortunate because my dad was an affirming one. I already know and have long known that I do not need to be just like him to succeed in or be happy in life or make him proud. He, the six-foot, three-sport letterman jock made sure I knew he thought it was cool that I was a little nerd boy. He did not fear the words “I love you” like some Southern boomers of his ilk did and do. He told me often.

But I’ll keep my book. Not just because I have not, at 33 years of age, yet reached the level of self-actualization that Darston did in a couple hours of video game plot, but because it is a miraculous and unbelievable physical manifestation of that love. Of that bond between me and my dad.

Somehow, I’ll try to see that the immense positive impact he had on me is reflected out into the world. I don’t know how. But hell, the ol’ sumbitch wasn’t even sober until he was 39. I’ve got time to figure it out.