The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom's Map is a Blessing and a Curse

 

It’s been a little while since I wrote about video games, huh? My most recent one at this point was my two-part review of 'Cassette Beasts'; I’m still pretty happy with that one, and developers Bytten Studio have gone on to some big things with the game since then (including multiple updates, an entire multiplayer mode, some DLC, and even a BAFTA nomination). I’ve actually been working on a lot of video game pieces in the time since then, but it can be slow-going.

It probably doesn’t help that what I’m covering in those pieces are indie games, and those can bring special challenges. Since they aren’t as big, you do kind of have to introduce people to the game to some degree, which is kind of its own art. Some of them are small enough that they won’t have much attention, and I want to do them justice since they might not get all that much coverage outside of that. But even the ones that get more attention, I’d like to do more than just give a recap and a basic recommendation; I want to bring something unique to the discussion, y’know? That in and of itself makes for more effort, and on top of that, I can feel a little out of practice sometimes.

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Instead, I figured I’d do something a little easier, to sort of work my way back up to those pieces. See if I can kind of shake off the rust a little. What if I covered a single, bigger game, something that I didn’t really have to explain or contextualize, and only tackled a few things rather than feeling the need to delve into every part of it?

So to that end: ‘Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ came out last year, and I had a pretty good time playing through it! It’s more or less a perfect attempt to bring the more open-world feeling of “Breath of the Wild” to the 2D Zelda format, which is a wild achievement in game design that breaks the traditional format open in some interesting ways. Nintendo once again tapped Grezzo to develop this one, and they bring back the toybox art style that they used in the ‘Link’s Awakening’ remake from back in 2019. It’s still gorgeous, and I’m so glad that there’s now an original game in the series using that look.

I’ve wanted to see a game with playable Zelda for ages now, but I had always kind of taken Nintendo’s explanation of (paraphrased) “we want a game that stars Zelda to play differently than the games starring Link” to be more of an excuse for why it hadn’t happened yet. But the Echoes system is actually a fascinating choice, and I enjoyed it a lot. Scouring the map for every possible item to copy felt like an interesting twist on the traditional Zelda hunt for items, especially since some of those new echoes ended up granting you movement options that opened up the map.

Music Monday: End of 2024 Playlist

Last time I made a big playlist article, I mentioned that it felt a little shorter than usual, and wasn’t sure if it was a trend or something. As it turned out, it was not! I was in the mood for finding new music the last few months, and then Year-End lists gave me a lot more to dig through on top of that (I still have a bunch of stuff from those earmarked to check out once this is done).

In the interest of time, I’m just going to jump right in. As always, if you like any of this stuff, definitely check out the full releases the songs are from; almost all of the songs are standing in for recommendations of the full album or EP. And maybe also consider supporting the artists in some way; a lot of them are small acts with Bandcamp pages, the platform that already gives the best compensation to artists (and Bandcamp Fridays, days where the site gives their cut to artists as well, will return in 2025 starting in March). Now for the YouTube and Spotify embeds:

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(As a reminder, if you'd like to know when a post goes up here, I have an email list! It's only used for new posts, and it is separate from my baseball article mailing list!)

Notes: As usual, not everything is on every list. Alpha’s music isn’t on either platform, but it is on their Soundcloud for those who want a non-Bandcamp option. The Spotify list is also missing iZme’s “Vivid” and the Live Session version of Knower’s “Overtime” (although I did substitute the studio version there). The YouTube list is missing two of the songs from SYM1 and one from The Only Humans, plus the Cheem song was only available as part of the full EP, so I left that one out too.



The Best Stuff:

Jamie Paige: Jamie Paige’s last album ‘Bittersweet’ was one of the earlier things I found when I started regularly browsing Bandcamp a few years ago, and I wound up listening to it a lot, as well as her follow-up singles and backlog. Several years later, and she’s finally released her next full album, ‘Constant Companions’, and it feels like it lived up to expectations. More of what I liked, but also new in ways that differentiate it so it feels fresh. She’s on a bit more of a kick with vocal synths here than on ‘Bittersweet’, but even that feels like a natural evolution, and she does some fun things with them.

There’s something about her songwriting style that just naturally draws me in, bursting with joyful energy and electric hooks, full of layers of synths and instrumentation, with recurring motifs and callbacks that can feel like their own ideas, and lyrics that lean can lean on big feelings but also a sense of humor, plus hint of sci-fi and fantasy ideas that can lend themselves to the idea of a bigger text and differentiate themselves from a lot of other songs, which can draw out emotion in fun, unexpected ways. Even stuff like the opener, "Dyad", about her desire to do both stuff like her last album and playing around with more Vocaloid songs, gets recast in both a more fantastic (a conversation between a person and a digital singer) and mundane (it’s literally recast as separation from someone you love and wanting connect with them), and that sort of layers are fun to think through and make it so easy to relate with.

Music Monday: CHVRCHES: Building a Greatest Hits

For a bit now, I’ve been wanting to do more Music Monday articles that aren’t just “Playlists of What I’ve Been Listening To Lately”, but wasn’t sure what. I started kicking around a deep dive into one of my favorite bands, CHVRCHES, but the piece wound up kind of long and I never quite finished it before getting distracted with other writing.

However! Last Friday, the group’s frontwoman Lauren Mayberry released her debut solo album, ‘Vicious Creature’. I’ll almost certainly write about ‘Vicious Creature’ at some point too, but I don’t quite work on that quick of a turn-around to have a review out yet; instead, I decided that would be a fun and topical reason to go back and finish the Chvrches idea. So, please join me as I look back at their discography so far, and how I would construct a Greatest Hits album for the group.

If you want to listen along as you read, here’s a YouTube link to my final playlist, and here’s a Spotify one.

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I’ve mentioned several times over the years here at Out of Left Field that I’m a big fan of the band Chvrches. I instantly fell in love with their sound when I stumbled across their 'Recover' EP just over a decade ago and have been along for the ride ever since, through their first album (which released later in 2013), their three subsequent albums, dozens of singles and other releases, and multiples tours (several of which I’ve even been able to attend!). I’ve even gotten to highlight their music here at Out of Left Field multiple times, the most notable of which was probably when I featured their most recent album, 'Screen Violence', at the top of my Summer 2021 Playlist.

Of course, the last major blurb I’ve written about them was over a year, as part of my Summer 2023 Playlist. For those who maybe missed it, I noted that there were a lot of factors that maybe feel like the end of something for the band; they released a special 10th Anniversary Edition of that debut record, The Bones of What You Believe, at least two thirds of the group has started releasing has started releasing music for side projects (Iain Cook with his duo Protection, which made my Start of 2023 Playlist with their debut EP, 'SEEDS I'*, and Lauren Mayberry as a solo artist, who made the Summer 2023 Playlist and its two follow-ups with new singles, although news of a full album remains stubbornly elusive^; I haven’t heard anything about if remaining member Martin Doherty is working on anything else), and their most recent new song (leaving aside the previously-unreleased tracks getting included on the Anniversary album) is a completely stand-alone single simply titled “Over”.

*Edit from Present Day Theo: While editing and polishing this, I learned that their EP ‘SEEDS II’ released late last year, and I just didn’t hear about it? I guess that’s going on the next playlist as well.

^Edit 2: As the new intro made clear, whatever studio roadblocks were delaying things here have been resolved, obviously.

Granted, the band hasn’t announced a hiatus to pursue other projects, or anything official like that. In fact, Chvrches recently signed new deals with record labels in the US and UK, leaving the label that had covered all of their releases up until now (I actually completely missed that news until I started researching this article!). So it maybe makes sense that there’s a bittersweet sense of moving on here; the band isn’t Over, but it definitely feels like the closing of one chapter in their story.

All of that kind of made me want to write something about them, some sort of retrospective on their first decade as a group, and when we’re talking about musicians, there’s a pretty natural vehicle for that: the Greatest Hits album. Or at least, that’s where my mind goes, since that was how I was introduced to a lot of older artists when I was growing up and learning about their past releases. I don’t really know how much of a demand there is for that these days, when most artists have their entire discographies on streaming services, and people are more inclined to pick out individual songs to try there rather than commit to an entire album.

Thankfully, though, I’m just one person using the concept of a “Greatest Hits” album to talk about a group that I love, rather than a marketing executive who actually has to sell the thing. And I do think that there’s at least some merit to the method of getting a curated walk through the best an artist has to offer, especially in the case of smaller acts where a casual listener might not know a dozen or more of their songs offhand.

But also, maybe there’s something to thinking about Greatest Hits in the context of modern music. There’s value in looking at the biggest hits of an artist’s career, the songs that resonated with the most people, and getting some sort of objective standard to build a look at their career. But also… if you’re a fan of a musician, I can almost guarantee that there are things you disagree with when just ranking songs by how big of a hit they were, whether that’s deep cuts that never got to be singles, or singles that took off despite being black sheeps in the artist’s discography, or songs that just went underappreciated for whatever reason.

Since these types of compilation albums are basically just playlists, and those are so quick and easy to assemble these days, maybe there’s value in just making more personalized Best Of collections? It feels like a difficult line to walk, like it could easily overload people with too many options as everyone builds their own list.

But… as a companion to an article, it at least feels justified, I think. So if you’re new to CHVRCHES and want to get a taste, or if you’re a fan who wants an excuse to revisit another fan’s perspective on the highlights of their catalog, I’m hoping this piece serves as a good jumping off piece!