Players Turn ‘Echoes’ in ‘The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ Into Cheat Codes

On top of table, Princess Zelda magically binds herself to a green machine that empties air. He immediately pulls the screen back as the wind blows the table forward along with any jet engine. “Table go vroom-vroom” reads the synopsis—just a small taste of what the creative player can do. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdomthe latest in the series from Nintendo.

Echoes of Wisdom it’s about finding new ways to use the world’s resources. It relies on Zelda’s ability to copy enemies and objects and reuse them as needed. In the early days of its creation, developers experimented with different ways the game could be played. That included the ability to customize dungeons by copying and pasting things like doors or candles, allowing players to create their own gameplay—and their own cheats.

When series creator Eiji Aonuma had a chance to check it out, however, he had a different take. “While it’s nice to make your own dungeon and let other people play it,” he said in a recent Ask a Developer post on Nintendo’s site, “it’s not so bad to put things that can be copied and pasted into the game field, and create a game where they can be used to fight enemies.”

So no, Echoes of Wisdom he is not a prison builder. Love The Legend of Zelda: Tears of Empirehowever, its ability to create temporary solutions and objects means that players quickly find unusual ways to traverse the world and conquer its many levels. In some cases, by using things in a very unusual way it seems that they should not exist.

One of the Echoes of WisdomThe most practical and clear things: a simple bed, with a brown frame. Players quickly connect the beds as a way to travel—place couples and make a beautiful bridge or ladder. Take one out of combat and Zelda can lay down to recover while the summoned monsters fight for her. In one particularly inspired example, the player placed Zelda on a bed and called upon an enemy to create a gust of wind that sent the bed flying. Tables are equally useful, especially if you want to stop a few guards from their prison.

On Reddit, players are sharing creations that have allowed them to pass through both gateless environments and the laws of gravity. Another used the method of building a variety of flying machines, which do not require a bed, by tying together a crow, a rock, and an enemy that creates a gust of wind. In the game’s water temple, which requires players to gradually raise the water level to reach the top, one curious traveler figured out how to bypass all the chaos by carefully stacking water blocks—the echoes of which create a contained cube of water that Zelda can swim in—straight up.

As with the creation of these modes of operation, they play right into Nintendo’s hands. While echoes may feel like nerfing of the Tears mechanics that allow players to create flaming phalluses, Nintendo still wanted to give them the ability to “be corrupt.” As director Tomomi Sano said, the point is for players to find ways to use echoes that are “so clever that it feels like cheating.”