Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Speedrunner wasted absolutely no time breaking Echoes of Wisdom into little pieces

A The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom speedrun streamer has gotten their hands on Echoes of Wisdom, and unsurprisingly, they’re tearing it apart with their speedrun brains.

SmallAnt is a streamer known for his antics in Mario, Pokemon, and Minecraft, but he has also been known to extend these escapades to games like Tears of the Kingdom, where he was only the second person to 100 the game % played through. After SmallAnt also tries to defeat Tears of the Kingdom without using any key items and collects every stone in Hyrule, it seems like he’s finally running out of things to do – just in time for Echoes of Wisdom appears.

Echoes of Wisdom differs from the open world of Tears of the Kingdom with a top-down approach reminiscent of the Link’s Awakening remake. You might think that this means there would be a little less freedom for players than in these open-world games, but that’s not really true – Zelda’s ability to scan and copy items in the world means that there are a lot of options , solving various puzzles, and SmallAnt wastes little time pushing this system to its limits.

Zelda Pro plays Echoes of Wisdom for the first time – YouTube

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Right at the start of the game, he uses impressive parkour to trap two prison guards in the cell where Zelda is locked up. After that, it really doesn’t take long before he completely turns the game on its head. By carefully stacking a few beds on top of each other, he can climb the trees that serve as a barrier for Zelda, preventing her from moving freely across the map. Once she’s up there, she can go almost anywhere and let SmallAnt skip some important parts of the game.

There are storylines that keep Zelda at least a little closer to the straightforward, but after playing the game myself for an Echoes of Wisdom preview, I know that SmallAnt finds its way around much more quickly than Nintendo had planned, what with the discovery of culminated in a particularly powerful creature that, once copied, makes some of the trickier early fights pretty trivial.

While you might think this is contrary to what Nintendo wants, that’s not really the case either. Ahead of the game’s release, series producer Eiji Aonuma explained that while offering “too much freedom” had been a problem, the developers had moved past it. Aonuma points to Breath of the Wild’s most infamous shrine explosion and says banning creative problem-solving isn’t fun for players. With 2D Zelda now existing alongside 3D Zelda, the inventive workarounds that characterized Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild are likely to remain, meaning SmallAnt is developing speedrunning strategies from the start that are quite valid are.

Maybe you need these speedrun strategies, since Echoes of Wisdom is “8 times the size” of Link’s Awakening.

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