It's been a while since I've felt the urge to fire up my Nintendo Switch. This last week, however, Zelda: Echoes of the Kingdom dropped through my letterbox – I'd half forgotten I'd pre-ordered the latest Zelda title – and slowly but surely I've become obsessed with Nintendo's latest game.
For me, Echoes of the Kingdom is yet another 5-star Nintendo first-party title – despite a significant conflict of reviews (including a harsh 3/5 from The Guardian). I wouldn't say the same about its previous Zelda title, though, as Tears of the Kingdom was a flop in my view – its fiddly build mechanics disrupted the flow of gameplay to such an extent I abandoned that Zelda title (a first-ever for me!).
What I love about Zelda: Echoes of the Kingdom is that it leverages Nintendo nostalgia, with a clear link to the Switch remake of SNES classic A Link to the Past in the updated Link's Awakening. However, just like that Link remake, there's a problem with Echoes – the current Switch hardware just isn't good enough to maintain a stable frame-rate and I find it positively jarring at times.
Despite possessing one of the best OLED TVs at the moment (a Philips OLED 909 is setup) and ensuring it's in Game Mode with all the smoothing and motion and VRR settings activated and maximised, there's no escaping that Nintendo just really hasn't optimised Echoes of Wisdom. And it shows just how aged the Switch hardware is – to struggle with this fairly simplistic-looking isometric game's graphical demand.
Which brings me to my main point: Echoes of Wisdom epitomises the reason why Nintendo needs to launch the Switch 2 imminently. Furthermore, though, it reinforces the idea that Nintendo really needs to maintain backwards compatibility between original and second-gen Switch hardware – as I'm sure the Japanese gaming company will sell yet more titles as a result (I know of people already holding off on buying Echoes, for example, in wait for a new hardware reveal).
However, it does make me wonder, has Nintendo been benchmarking Echoes' performance on newer hardware? The lack of optimisation on current Switch models seems somewhat baffling to me. Eurogamer didn't hesitate to call out the game for performance issues either, which I fully agree with.
Because, at the heart of it, Echoes of Wisdom is such a deeply thoughtful and complex game. It requires a lot of thought, but with a full palette of capabilities to navigate through the world – as you can create 'echoes' of objects/enemies that accumulate to a massive 127 options all-in – it's the most exciting Zelda game since the Switch's launch in my view.
Ultimately a 5-star game such as this deserves 5-star hardware. And that's my argument for why the Switch 2 should have backwards compatibility too. I just hope Nintendo doesn't make the same marketing mistake when the hardware is finally official. Which I really hope is for the holiday period this year, not March 2025 as now rumoured...
