‘My jaw dropped’: ‘The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ was hiding a big secret under all that adventurous charm

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has confirmed my longest standing suspicion.

Zelda‘s genre is neither adventure nor fantasy, but cosmic horror. Just what in the eldritch abomination is going on at game’s end? I’ll explain.

Straight out of Majora’s playbook…

Majora’s Mask isn’t in the only Zelda game to feature an insane, gibbering alien horror from beyond space and time as a final boss. Echoes of Wisdom does it too! Throughout the game, Zelda has been running around Hyrule with companion Tri, battling monsters with more monsters Attack on Titan style in order to rescue Link and save the Kingdom of Hyrule. On the way to the finale, the game offers additional bombshell information bits like why Link does’t talk, but that’s an article for another time.

Link and Zelda finally team up in the game’s last dungeon, the Still Ancient Ruins, and it is there they meet an extra-dimensional horror from beyond the stars. A creature to make Majora itself clutch its eldritch pearls. A creature known simply as Null.

But who, or WHAT, exactly IS Null?

Null, like Majora of Majora’s Mask past, is two things: tricky and hungry. When entering the final dungeon, Zelda is faced with The Demon King Ganon himself. Classic. Ganon appears as the final antagonist in basically every game. It’s his schtick. After all, he’s the reincarnation of the primordial force of evil Demise, a being whose reincarnations Link and Zelda are doomed to fight for all eternity. He’s the be all and the end all of evil… or is he? Ganon puts up a fight against Zelda, and when Zelda defeats him, it’s revealed that she has defeated nothing more than an echo? But who is the puppet master holding the strings? Crafty old Null, a being that has hungered for destruction since time immemorial.

Before the world was formed by the three Golden Goddesses, there was only the void. A timeless, endless empty space populated only by Null – the anathema of existence. Whenever anything attempted to come into being in the realm of nothingness, Null would gobble it back up again. Only after the three goddesses descended from the Heavens and shaped Hyrule was life finally able to take root, and Null was relegated to the shadows. The being has been pulling the strings of evil ever since, driving the reality itself towards destruction so the universe can once again return to the void from which it was born. Now THAT is sinister.

After defeating Null, Zelda and Link, and are whisked back to the bright overworld’s light, where Tri thanks them before launching itself into the sky and falling upon the land like a comet, healing all the fissures in the map and bringing back all the people and animals. Healing every fissure but the one in my heart, that is, the one that formed after Tri said goodbye to Zelda and returned to the realm of the goddesses along with the rest of the faeries. Zelda is then transported back to Hyrule castle, where she is reunited with Link, who rightfully gives her all the credit for saving the realm. The game ends with her looking up into the sky, wishing Tri one final goodbye.

(Featured Image: Nintendo)