Can Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom's UI Be Fixed?

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is inventive and charming, but its main echo-selection menu is a serious user interface problem.

Zelda can save copies of objects and monsters she finds, then spawn them into the world. Those echoes can solve puzzles, bridge gaps, or create a little team of creatures to fight on her behalf.

The idea is wonderfully creative. The problem is the menu. To pick an echo, the player holds the left bumper and scrolls through a list of every collected object and monster. Early on, that is fine. By the end of the game, with more than 120 echoes, it becomes a single gigantic horizontal line.

The list wraps around, and it can be sorted by type, last used, most used, last learned, or cost. Those tools help a little, but not enough. Many players and reviewers called out the same frustration. So the design challenge is simple: can the echo menu become faster and more enjoyable without damaging the game around it?

The first step is to rebuild the current interface in Unity, close enough to test alternatives. That means gathering images for the echoes, putting them into a scene, and building a little menu item with standard UI components.

Unity's horizontal layout group is useful here. Put every echo under the same parent, define the padding, and the interface can arrange them into one long row. A cursor can sit in the center while the entire row shifts left or right when the player presses a direction.

If the row moves by exactly the width of one echo plus its spacing, the selected icon lines up cleanly each time. The code also needs to track the first and last icons, so trying to move past one end snaps to the other.

A single-frame jump feels ugly, so the movement benefits from a small animation. Dotween can slide the row from one position to the next, making the menu feel more like a real game interface than a debug tool.

A fake HUD, an echo-name label, sound effects, and an automated prefab script complete the recreation. The useful trick is naming each spawned icon from its image filename, so the label updates automatically when the selection changes.

At that point, the baseline menu exists. Now the question becomes what kind of improvement is actually appropriate.

The least radical option is acceleration. In the original-style list, scrolling moves at the same speed no matter how long the player holds a direction. With more than 100 items, that is a problem.

The prototype can keep an acceleration value that rises while a direction is held. Each movement animation then becomes shorter by dividing its normal duration by that acceleration value. The longer the stick is held, the faster the row moves.

This is easy to implement and immediately useful. It also creates a new problem: when the list moves quickly, especially while wrapping from one end to the other, the player can lose their place.

A position indicator helps. A small marker showing where the current selection sits inside the full list gives the player enough orientation to use the speed safely.

That makes acceleration a strong option-one fix. It does not change the menu's structure, but it makes the worst cases less painful.

The next idea comes from the PlayStation 3's Cross Media Bar. That interface used a horizontal row for high-level categories, then vertical rows for the items inside each category.

Echoes of Wisdom has many echoes that naturally group together. There are dungeon statues, monsters with stronger level-2 and level-3 versions, and elemental variants such as fire, ice, and electric Keese.

A menu can keep the horizontal axis, but splinter some entries into vertical stacks. Unity supports this neatly: a vertical layout group can sit inside the original horizontal layout group.

The prototype can tag those vertical columns, then only respond to up and down input when the selected object belongs to one of those columns. Moving horizontally still shifts between columns. Moving vertically shifts within the current grouped stack.

This works surprisingly well. After sorting echoes into sensible groups, the horizontal list can shrink from more than 100 entries to around 55. That cuts the horizontal travel roughly in half.

It also creates useful memory. If the player leaves a favorite Lizalfos in the center of a vertical stack, that vertical position can stay remembered, making the item easy to reach again.

The tradeoff is visual density. Showing multiple icons above and below the main row can become overwhelming, so a shadow or mask helps push the off-axis options into the background.

Echoes of Wisdom already has a second echo-selection method: the notebook. Open it, move to the right tab, and the echoes appear in a grid.

That grid is faster to navigate because it has multiple columns instead of one long row. But it is less convenient. The player must pause, and the notebook may open on another tab, such as equipment or potions.

It also uses a vertically oriented list in a game that is always played on a landscape screen. That leaves potential screen space unused.

Turning the notebook idea sideways is easy in Unity because the grid layout group follows the same basic concept as the horizontal and vertical layout groups. Child objects can be aligned to a grid, and the designer can set the number of rows and columns.

A grid does not automatically solve everything, but it points toward a larger idea: stop treating every echo as one item in one row, and start treating the collection as pages.

Minecraft is a useful comparison because creative mode contains a huge number of objects. It solves the overload with several methods, including search and nested lists, but the most relevant idea here is tabs.

A tabbed echo grid can split the full collection into a limited number of categories: objects, flying and ghost-like creatures, water and ice monsters, common creatures, soldiers, and similar broad groups.

With five pages, each page can fit a large number of echoes on screen at once without scrolling. The player only has to choose the right category, then pick from a smaller field.

The prototype can track the current tab and cycle to the next one when the player presses the right bumper. Two shoulder buttons would be ideal, but Echoes of Wisdom already asks the player to hold the left bumper to keep the echo list open. One tab button may be more comfortable.

A direct hide-and-show transition looks cheap, so the page change benefits from subtle motion: fade the old tab out, move it slightly, and fade the new one in. That small animation suggests flipping through pages without slowing the interaction down.

A little page indicator, adapted from the game's existing sorting display, finishes the concept. Option three is a grid with tabs: clear, compact, and well suited to a landscape screen.

The tabbed grid has one ergonomic issue. Unless the player moves their thumb to the D-pad, they are navigating a rectangular grid with an analog stick.

A grid is digital. It has right angles, straight lines, and discrete steps. An analog stick is built for direction and angle. Anyone who has typed on a console virtual keyboard with a stick knows the mismatch.

That is why many console games use radial menus. A radial menu sits around the stick's natural range of motion. The player points in a direction, and the menu selects the option at that angle.

Unity does not provide a radial layout group by default, so the prototype needs some math to place each echo around a circle. The stick angle can then map to the circle angle and highlight the matching echo.

This feels elegant with a small number of items. Put the echo name in the center, make the cursor follow the selected icon, and the interface becomes quick and readable.

The problem is scale. Sixteen echoes work nicely. One hundred and sixteen do not.

A radial menu could become a favorites ring instead of the full echo list. Animal Crossing does something similar by letting the player keep a small set of tools on an easy-access ring while the full inventory remains elsewhere.

For Echoes of Wisdom, that would absolutely work as a utility feature. The player could keep their favorite traversal tools, favorite combat creatures, and favorite puzzle helpers close at hand.

But it may also contradict the intended experience. Co-director Satoshi Terada explained in a BBC interview that one essence of the game is finding different ways to use each echo. The team wanted players to notice echoes they may have forgotten while browsing through the full collection.

In other words, the slow list may be trying to make the player less efficient but more creative. While scrolling, the player might spot an echo they would not have intentionally searched for, then rethink the current puzzle or obstacle.

That is a defensible idea. It also may not work as intended. If browsing the list is painful enough, a player may avoid experimentation and stick to a small set of reliable creatures anyway.

A favorites ring would make that behavior even stronger. If the goal is discovery, the interface should reduce pain without hiding most of the toy box.

This is the most interesting part of the design problem. The obvious solution is not automatically the right solution.

A faster menu can make the game feel better moment to moment. But if the ability is built around improvisation, the menu also needs to expose forgotten possibilities.

That creates a tension between efficiency and discovery. Pure efficiency pushes the player toward known favorites. Pure discovery can become friction. The best interface probably needs to sit between those poles.

Super Mario Maker 2 suggests one compromise: multiple radial menus that the player can jump between with shoulder buttons. That keeps analog selection while separating the full catalog into smaller groups.

But there is another, stranger option that tries to keep radial control while holding far more items at once.

Beyond Good & Evil has a memorable spiral keyboard system. It is over-engineered, but it is genuinely fast with an analog stick because it keeps the benefits of radial control while stacking far more options than one ring can comfortably show.

An echo menu can borrow that idea. Start with the same radial placement code, then let the circle loop around on top of itself several times. In three dimensions, the items form a spiral staircase. For a 2D menu, that spiral can be flattened onto the screen.

The analog stick angle still selects around the circle. The difficulty is that many echoes now overlap at similar angles, so the interface needs to enable only the current selection and a handful of nearby echoes.

That limited active window gives the system a clear target. Nearby echoes can shift position, change scale, and fade in or out to sell the sense of a stack rising out of the screen.

The result is playful and surprisingly practical. It also naturally includes acceleration: spin the stick slowly to move carefully, or spin it quickly to race through the spiral.

It still needs orientation help, such as the scrollbar from the acceleration prototype, but it solves a hard combination of requirements. It keeps analog control, supports a large catalog, and still lets the player encounter nearby items while moving through the list.

The five options all solve different parts of the problem. Acceleration improves the original list with almost no structural change. A cross-media bar compresses related items into spatial categories. A tabbed grid uses the landscape screen better. A favorites ring is fast but risks narrowing play. A spiral menu keeps analog motion while scaling beyond a simple radial wheel.

The important lesson is that a menu is not only a container for options. It shapes how players think.

If Echoes of Wisdom wants players to rediscover forgotten echoes, then a purely efficient favorites system may work against the game. But if the full list is so painful that players refuse to browse it, the discovery goal fails anyway.

A good redesign would make movement through the collection faster, clearer, and more tactile while still letting unused echoes appear in the player's path. The fix is not just to make the menu shorter. It is to make exploration through the menu feel like part of the creative play.