Echoes of Wisdom hides in a list

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Nintendo, 2024, hands Zelda a delightful power. She copies objects and creatures and sets them back down to solve the room. The reasonable praise is that the game is full of ideas. The thing that actually interrupts play is the list you scroll to reach them. A power that takes a menu, a page, and a confirmation is a power you use less than the designer hoped.

Interface, here, is not a coat of paint on a finished toy. It is the cost of the toy. Every extra step between seeing a gap and placing an echo is a tax on experimentation, which is the whole pleasure. The fix is not a prettier icon. It is a shorter path: the copies you just used stay near your hands, and the long list is for the ones you have not touched in an hour.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is charming and full of ideas, and the menu you use to reach those ideas is one of the weakest interfaces in the series.

The echo system lets Zelda record copies of objects and monsters she runs into, then place them back into the world at will. An echo can bridge a gap, break a puzzle open, or assemble a small squad of creatures that fights for her.

None of that is the issue. The issue is the delivery. Selecting an echo means holding the left bumper and scrolling sideways through everything you have ever recorded. In the opening hours the list is short and harmless. Past 120 echoes it has become one enormous horizontal strip.

You can wrap around from either end, and you can sort by type, last used, most used, last learned, or cost. Those options take the edge off without removing the problem, and plenty of players and reviewers landed on the same complaint. The design question that follows is narrow: can echo selection get quicker and more pleasant without harming the game it belongs to?

Nothing can be judged against the original until the original exists again, so the work starts by reconstructing the menu in Unity closely enough to compare alternatives against it.

That means collecting echo images, dropping them into a scene, and assembling one menu entry out of stock UI components.

Unity's horizontal layout group does most of the arranging. Parent every echo to the same object, set the padding, and the row builds itself. The cursor can then stay parked in the middle of the screen while the whole strip slides left or right in response to input.

Shift the strip by one echo width plus one gap and the selected icon lands centered every time. The script also has to know which icon is first and which is last, so an input past either end wraps to the opposite side.

Snapping between positions in a single frame reads as broken, so the movement wants easing. Dotween can carry the row from one slot to the next, which is the difference between a debug view and something that feels like a shipped menu.

A mock HUD, a name label, sound effects, and a script that spawns the prefabs finish the reconstruction. One small trick pays off repeatedly: name each icon after its image file, and the label updates itself whenever the selection moves.

With a working baseline in hand, you can stop theorizing and start playing each alternative, which is the only way to tell an improvement from a rearrangement.

The most conservative fix is to let the list speed up as you hold a direction. In the original, the scroll rate never changes no matter how long you push, and past a hundred entries that constant rate is the whole problem.

The prototype tracks an acceleration value that climbs while a direction stays held, then divides the normal animation duration by that value. Hold longer, and each step takes less time.

It takes very little code and helps immediately. It also introduces a fresh problem: once the strip is flying, and especially once it wraps from one end to the other, you stop knowing where you are.

A position readout closes that gap. Even a thin marker showing where the current pick sits within the whole collection restores enough orientation to make the extra speed usable.

So option one is acceleration. The structure of the menu is untouched, but its worst moments hurt less.

The second prototype takes its shape from the PlayStation 3's Cross Media Bar, which ran high-level categories along a horizontal axis and the contents of each category down a vertical one.

Echoes of Wisdom is full of entries that already belong together. Dungeon statues form a set. Monsters arrive with stronger level-2 and level-3 versions. Keese come in fire, ice, and electric variants.

Keep the horizontal strip, then break some of its entries downward into vertical stacks. Unity handles this without complaint, since a vertical layout group nests happily inside the horizontal one.

Tag the vertical columns, and have the menu accept up and down input only while the current selection belongs to one of them. Left and right still move between columns; up and down move inside whichever stack you are standing in.

The result is better than expected. Group the echoes sensibly and the horizontal strip drops from over 100 entries to roughly 55, cutting the sideways distance about in half.

There is a second benefit in memory. Park a favorite Lizalfos halfway down its stack, keep that vertical position remembered, and it stays a short trip away rather than a search.

The cost is clutter. Icons stacked above and below the main row can swamp the eye, so a mask or a drop shadow is needed to push everything off the main axis into the background.

A better layout is already sitting inside the game. Echoes of Wisdom has a second way to pick an echo: open the notebook, move to the correct tab, and the whole collection appears as a grid.

Multiple columns beat one endless row, so the grid is genuinely quicker to move through. It is also less convenient, because you have to stop playing to reach it, and the notebook may open on equipment or potions instead.

On top of that it runs a tall, narrow list on a screen that is always wider than it is high, so a good deal of display area goes unused.

Rotating that concept into landscape is straightforward in Unity, because the grid layout group works on the same principle as the horizontal and vertical ones. Children snap to a grid, and you choose how many rows and columns that grid has.

A grid by itself does not settle the question, but it suggests the shift that does: stop treating the collection as one item in one line, and start treating it as pages.

Once the collection is paged, the job becomes picking a category first and an echo second, and Minecraft is the obvious reference because creative mode has to serve an enormous object list.

Minecraft attacks the overload from several angles, including search and nested lists, but the piece that transfers here is tabs.

A tabbed echo grid can divide everything into a handful of broad buckets: plain objects, flying and ghostly creatures, water and ice monsters, ordinary critters, soldiers, and so on.

Five pages is enough for each page to hold a lot of echoes on screen at once with no scrolling at all. The player narrows to a category, then chooses inside a much smaller field.

The prototype stores the active tab and advances to the next one on a right bumper press. Two shoulder buttons would be the natural mapping, but the left bumper is already held down to keep the list open, so one tab button is the kinder choice.

Cutting straight from one page to the next looks unfinished, so the swap wants a little motion: fade and nudge the outgoing page away, fade the incoming one in. It suggests turning pages without adding delay.

Reusing the game's own sorting readout as a page indicator completes it. Option three is the tabbed grid: compact, legible, and a much better fit for a landscape display.

The tabbed grid has an input problem rather than a layout one. Unless the player shifts their thumb over to the D-pad, they are steering a rectangular grid with an analog stick.

Grids are digital. They are made of right angles, straight lines, and discrete cells. A stick reports direction and angle instead. Anyone who has entered their name on a console keyboard with a stick has felt the mismatch.

Radial menus exist because of that mismatch. A ring maps onto the stick's natural sweep, so pointing in a direction is the selection, with no stepping involved.

Unity has no radial layout group, so this prototype needs its own math to distribute the echoes around a circle. From there the stick's angle maps to the circle's angle and highlights whatever sits at that bearing.

With a modest number of options it feels excellent. Put the echo name in the middle, let the cursor ride the selected icon, and selection becomes instant and easy to read.

Scale is where it collapses. Sixteen echoes around a ring are lovely. A hundred and sixteen are not.

The natural rescue for the ring is to stop showing everything and show only favorites. Animal Crossing takes that approach, keeping a small tool set on a quick-access ring while the full inventory lives elsewhere.

As a convenience for Echoes of Wisdom it would work without question. Your preferred traversal echo, your preferred fighter, and your preferred puzzle helper all sit one flick away.

The trouble is that it may push against what the game is for. Co-director Satoshi Terada told the BBC that part of the essence of the game is discovering different uses for each echo, The team wanted players to bump into echoes they had forgotten while paging through the full collection.

Read that way, the slow list is deliberately trading efficiency for creativity. Somewhere in the scroll you catch sight of something you would never have gone looking for, and the obstacle in front of you looks different.

It is a reasonable ambition, and it can still fail in practice. If browsing costs enough, players stop browsing and settle on the same few dependable creatures.

A favorites ring would harden that habit rather than break it. If discovery is the point, the interface has to remove pain without putting most of the toy box out of sight.

The most interesting part of this problem is that the obvious answer and the correct answer may not be the same answer.

Speed makes the game nicer minute to minute. But when the central ability runs on improvisation, the menu also has a job to do: putting forgotten possibilities back in front of you.

Efficiency and discovery pull in opposite directions. Optimize purely for efficiency and players converge on a handful of known picks. Optimize purely for discovery and you are defending friction. The right answer almost certainly sits somewhere between them.

Super Mario Maker 2 offers one middle path: several radial menus with shoulder buttons to hop between them. Analog selection survives, and the full catalog gets carved into manageable groups.

There is one more idea, less conventional than any of these, that tries to keep radial input while holding far more than a ring can show.

Beyond Good & Evil had an unusual spiral keyboard that is wildly over-built and, on a stick, genuinely quick, because it keeps everything good about radial input while stacking many more options than a single ring can display.

The echo menu can steal it. Start from the radial placement code, then let the circle keep looping over itself several times. In three dimensions the icons climb like a spiral staircase; for a 2D menu that staircase gets flattened onto the screen.

Stick angle still drives selection around the circle. The complication is that many echoes now share roughly the same bearing, so the menu has to keep only the current pick and a few of its neighbors active.

That narrow active window turns out to be an advantage. The neighbors can be moved, scaled, and faded to sell the illusion of a stack lifting out of the screen.

It ends up playful and more practical than it sounds. Acceleration comes free with it, too: roll the stick gently to inch along, or whip it around to tear through the spiral.

It still wants an orientation aid, like the scrollbar built for the acceleration prototype, but it satisfies a hard set of requirements at once. Analog input survives, the full catalog fits, and echoes you were not looking for still pass through your field of view.

Each of the five prototypes fixes a different piece. Acceleration patches the existing list with almost no structural change. The cross-media bar folds related echoes into spatial groups. The tabbed grid finally uses the width of the screen. The favorites ring is the quickest and the most likely to narrow play. The spiral holds onto stick input while scaling past what one ring can carry.

The takeaway is that a menu is never only a container. It teaches players how to think about what is inside it.

If Echoes of Wisdom wants people rediscovering echoes they had forgotten, a ruthlessly efficient favorites system fights the game. But if the full list is unpleasant enough that nobody browses it, the discovery goal dies anyway.

The redesign worth having makes moving through the collection quicker, clearer, and more physical, while still letting neglected echoes cross your path. Shortening the menu is not the goal. Making the trip through it feel like part of the creative play is.

In the Flockbay app, ask for a hero who places copies of three objects, and put those three on buttons rather than in a menu. Play a room that needs the right copy in the right spot. Then ask for twenty copies behind one list and play the same room. The second version will tell you what the menu costs.

An AI adventure game maker is the right scale. A puzzle adventure template keeps the room small enough to feel the tax.