A speedrunning The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom streamer has gotten their hands on Echoes of Wisdom, and unsurprisingly, they're using their speedrunning brain to tear it to shreds.
SmallAnt is a streamer well known for their antics across Mario, Pokemon, and Minecraft, but they've also been known to extend those antics to games like Tears of the Kingdom, where they became only the second person to 100% the game. Having also tried to beat Tears of the Kingdom without using any key items and collect every rock in Hyrule, it seems SmallAnt's finally run out of things to do - just in time for Echoes of Wisdom to come along.
Echoes of Wisdom differs from Tears of the Kingdom's open world, with a top-down approach reminiscent of the Link's Awakening remake. You might think that means there's a bit less player freedom than those open-world games, but that's not really true - Zelda's ability to scan and copy items in the world means that there are lots of ways to solve different puzzles, and SmallAnt wastes little time in pushing that system to the limit.
Right at the start of the game, he uses some impressive parkour to trap a pair of prison guards in the cell Zelda finds herself imprisoned in. After that, it's really not very long at all before he's breaking the game wide open. By carefully stacking some beds on top of one another, he's able to climb onto the trees that are supposed to act as a barrier for Zelda, preventing her roaming freely over the map. Once she's up there, she can get almost anywhere, letting SmallAnt skip over some meaty chunks of the game.
There are story beats that keep Zelda at least a little closer to the straight and narrow, but having played the game myself for an Echoes of Wisdom preview, I know that SmallAnt's getting around a lot quicker than Nintendo planned for, culminating in the discovery of a particularly strong creature that, once copied, makes some of the trickier early fights pretty trivial.
While you might think this flies in the face of what Nintendo wants, that's also not really the case. In the run-up to the game's release, series producer Eiji Aonuma explained that while offering "too much freedom" had been a concern, it was one the devs moved past. Citing Breath of the Wild's most infamous shrine exploit, Aonuma says disallowing creative problem-solving isn't fun for players. With 2D Zelda now existing in tandem with 3D Zelda, the inventive workarounds that shaped Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild are likely to be sticking around, which means SmallAnt cooking up speedrunning strats right from the start is perfectly valid.
You might need those speedrun strats, since Echoes of Wisdom is "8 times the size" of Link's Awakening.
