The echoes in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom are powerful. Princess Zelda has at her fingertips the power to summon hordes of enemies, but even more notable is her ability to summon items such as beds and tables, or even pillars of water, to navigate her environment. With the ability to create a conga line of stacked beds to reach high surfaces, Hyrule is Zelda’s playground.

Yet I can’t help but notice that many players have severely limited the potential of their echoes by an adherence to the in-game grid. Using off-the-grid thinking can allow some seriously strong use of your echoes.

What is the Grid?

What do I mean by this? Well, I mean “grid” quite literally. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom exists upon an invisible grid, and your echoes will be created along those grid lines. When you create an echo, it doesn’t appear directly in front of you, rather it is created at the nearest point on the grid. This is really easy to prove, simply create an echo directly in front of you. Odds are it will appear in front of you as expected. 

However, if you move ever so slightly left or right and then summon it again, you are likely to notice that it is summoned in the same position as before, not directly in front of you.

This is because the echoes aren’t programmed to be summoned in front of you, rather to the grid point nearest to you. This keeps things nice and orderly, and allows for levels to be designed with this grid in mind. It is also why so many things measure so neatly into blocks. A tree is two water blocks, a house is four, and the water block and crate are functionally the exact same height. Everything is made with this grid measurement in mind.

Which is why ignoring the grid entirely is so powerful.

Examples of Off-The-Grid Thinking

Your echoes are summoned along the grid, and once they exist, they are free game. The use of Tri’s grab ability allows fine control over objects entirely separate from the grid, and if an item is dropped, it will remain where it lands even if that is in a spot between two grid points. For example, take a look at these three crates. It is impossible to summon crates into a triangle formation, and I encourage you to try if you are skeptical. Rather, this can only be done by manipulating the third crate and manually placing it in position to form a triangle.

Obviously, the ability to make triangular crate formations is not exactly making Ganon quake in his boots, but it serves as an example of how Tri’s ability to move objects overrides the in-game grid, and using it to manipulate items off-grid is massively powerful. Take for example the humble bed. Even without optimization, it is already in the running for one of the most useful echoes. The ability to stack echoes into a staircase anywhere is extremely useful for navigation. But the true potential of beds can be unlocked with off-the-grid thinking, as they can not only cover height, but distance. 

Here is an example: 

Look at this gap in the basement of Hyrule Castle. The stacked beds are not even close to long enough to cover this gap. However, this is merely because they are programmed to spawn along the grid, which means the next bed summoned will overlap the previous bed by half. That is a huge amount of underutilized space. 

This can be fixed by using Tri to manually extend the bed out. Gravity evidently doesn’t always exist in Hyrule, and as long as the beds are mostly touching, you can extend them out all the way.

The result is a bed stack with the exact same number of beds, but reaching twice the distance as before. Simply by utilizing Tri to move the beds independent of the grid.

Exploring the Possibilities of Off-The-Grid Thinking

Trampolines are a fantastic item, but they are a bit limited by default, because they spawn directly on top of one another. Meaning they need to be stacked on tables or the like if you wish to make a trampoline staircase, and there can only really be two trampoline “steps” for your staircase due to echo limitations. It is rather limiting. 

However, by using Tri to manipulate each trampoline off axis, they can, in fact, be staircased on top of one another, making an extremely cool and useful trampoline staircase. I encourage you to think of other examples of overlapping echoes that could be useful.

For me personally, once Zelda gains the ability to jump higher, I find a staggered staircase of crates to be immensely useful as it reaches significantly higher than most other staircases. 

I am also a big fan of this rock structure with the slightly shifted rock, which allows Zelda to use it as portable cover from ranged enemies. She’s able to hide behind the off-axis rock and pop out to shoot an arrow, without falling off the structure. It served me well when dealing with certain ranged enemy spam.

There are all sorts of different ways that off-grid thinking can be used to bring out the true power of your echoes, and I would love to hear about any more clever ideas you’ve had in the comments below. Or have you been thinking off-grid this entire time? I can’t wait to hear about it.

Featured Image: Nintendo

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