The best thing about Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom? The music

There’s been a slight sense of anticlimax after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. It’s a very good game, of course, but perhaps a few steps shy of the greatness we expect of the series. Its new, indirect gameplay style, with Zelda conjuring echoes of objects and monsters to solve puzzles and win battles, asks quite a lot of both players and the game’s designers, and there’s a feeling that it isn’t fully realized. Even Princess Zelda’s first starring role in the series that has borne her name for 38 years comes with a troubling asterisk or two.

But there’s one aspect of Echoes of Wisdom that fully lives up to the sky-high expectations fans have of the Zelda series — perhaps exceeds them. It’s the music. In terms of musicianship, production, and the unexpected genius of the concept, this might be the best, most exciting, and most apt Nintendo soundtrack since… maybe Mario Kart 8?

That might sound like an odd comparison, but hear me out. Everybody knows that Mario Kart 8’s soundtrack kicks ass. Why does it kick ass? Partly because it reframes classic video game music in a new context. It takes the kind of frenetic, funky themes of 16-bit-era chiptunes and arranges them for a live jazz-funk band complete with shredding lead guitar, frantic slap bass, and a full brass section. It’s a big, exciting sound that amplifies and refreshes something nostalgic — but also humanizes it and makes it more analog, so it has an even deeper connection with the listener. It rips.

Echoes of Wisdom’s soundtrack starts (but does not end) with a similarly simple, similarly genius instrumentation idea: What if Zelda music, but woodwind? Throughout the early part of the game, the dominant melodies and tones are brought forward by clarinets, oboes, recorders, and penny whistles, piping along over a modest-sized string section. It’s an unexpected and delightful sound: warm, innocent without being too childlike, intimate but with a sense of mystery and even melancholy.

The music for Echoes of Wisdom was written by a team of composers working under a music director: Nintendo veteran Hajime Wakai. Wakai has already reinvented Zelda music twice before. First, he did the obvious thing and blew it out cinematically with a full orchestra for Skyward Sword. Then, as sound director for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, he oversaw a radical change of tack toward a gentle, ambient approach, led by meandering, unresolved piano lines.

Also — just as relevant to the Echoes of Wisdom score, if not more so — Wakai was the composer for the original Pikmin, and wrote many of that series’ signature tunes. Pikmin games have a unique musical soundscape, with warbling synths describing woozy melodies over odd, shuffling, plinky-plonk rhythms. Wakai’s instinct isn’t always to make music that’s big and enveloping. In Echoes of Wisdom, just as in Pikmin, he strips back the arrangement enough that you can hear every one of his unusual instrumentation choices drawing you down into a toylike world, rather than immersing you in a cinematic one.

Echoes of Wisdom’s score is melodically playful, too. Much more so than Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, this score looks to the past, with many callbacks to the Zelda soundtracks by the great Koji Kondo — his original theme and the immortal Ocarina of Time score in particular. But, rather than repeating Kondo’s melodies, the Echoes score repeatedly takes half a phrase from them and then goes somewhere else. The main overworld music starts with a familiar fanfare before writing a brand-new, less strident, more lyrical Zelda theme around the chord progressions of the old one. The ranch theme plays the first three notes of “Epona’s Song,” but then wanders off into relaxed recorder noodling over acoustic guitar, mandolin, and bongos. The seriously gorgeous music for the Sea Zora village brings back the harp arpeggios of “Zora’s Domain,” but then intertwines them with lilting flute, plucked guitar, and chiming glockenspiel.

There’s so much more of these lovely tunes, witty arrangements, and beautiful musicianship to enjoy in the full soundtrack. But the point is that Wakai and his collaborators approached this score the same way the designers approached the game — with a view to using the familiar, nostalgic joys of The Legend of Zelda as a starting point for a new journey and a fresh reinterpretation. Arguably, the musicians did the better job.