Halfway through my first adventure with Princess Zelda as the protagonist, she became a summoner who conjures dark knights at will and swims through airborne blocks of water she creates with her magic staff.

She is also prone to summon beds and take naps during battle. She can also disappear stealthily into a corner only for the guards to find nothing but a chair, leaving them to question their faculties. Zelda is a trickster goddess in her first starring role in a game, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, released Sept. 26 on the Nintendo Switch. Co-developed by Nintendo and the studio Grezzo, the first Zelda game starring a woman is also the first to be directed by a woman.

Last year’s Tears of the Kingdom was massive, and although Echoes is a smaller experience, it’s also the largest top-down Zelda game ever made as far as I can tell, with wide-open fields and hidden nooks and crannies hidden all over its new version of the kingdom of Hyrule, and secrets still to uncover dozens of hours later. Echoes proves Nintendo doesn’t make distinctions between its platforms. This Zelda is the new Zelda game, just as the Mario Kart game on the Nintendo 3DS wasn’t Mario Kart Handheld Version, it was Mario Kart 7.

I mention this because those larger Zelda games, namely Breath of the Wild and its sequel, inspired this game’s design, and those games were inspired by the Nintendo 3DS game A Link Between Worlds. The Zelda series is a daisy chain of interconnected and evolving ideas. Here, as in Tears, the priority is the player’s freedom to overcome challenges. Nintendo advertised exactly this in a recent spot for the game, “Save Hyrule Your Way,” featuring identical twins tackling Echoes in different ways.

In Echoes, Zelda is accused by her own kingdom of opening dimensional rifts that entrap people and places within the “Still World,” a frozen abyssal hellscape. She is assisted by a fairy named Tri who gives her a magical staff that can create copies, or echoes, of people and objects in the world. This is why she’s able to conjure blocks of water to swim through the air, while her summoned colony of bats protect her. She treks across a Hyrule that’s reminiscent of the map featured in the Super Nintendo classic Link to the Past, except here it’s expanded and clarified.

Water Princess Zelda is just how I played it. The game’s big draw is that the copying ability allows for unprecedented freedom to fight enemies and navigate treacherous dungeons. One of the first things she copies is a bed, and that turned out to be my second-most used object after the water block. Creating ladders and bridges of dirty beds remained a viable way to move through the world, all the way up until the very final dungeon. Sleeping on these beds is also the most efficient way to heal her: Taking naps during epic struggles will be a common sight for many players.

You can also save Hyrule your way with your own version of Princess Zelda. Maybe she’ll only summon spiders, using their webs to climb great heights. I took to casting electric moths that shoot toward enemies like missiles. Echoes is a shockingly combat-heavy game - don’t be fooled just because she doesn’t always use a sword (except in a meter-limited “sword fighter” form which mimics combat from past games). There’s even a series of combat challenges that strip her of all learned echoes, testing the player’s ability to improvise.

I just wish the central mechanic was easier to use. Copying objects is a simple concept, but choosing which object to cast is cumbersome, using the directional arrows to bring up menus that scroll for way too long, with 127 different echoes by the game’s end. Other directions on the pad are also used for other functions that seem superfluous to the game. She later gets the ability to use robots, which feels redundant (I finished the main quest without using them). Zelda’s absurd power is a huge part of what makes Echoes unique and fun, but it comes at the cost of some balance to the game. She’s overstuffed with ability, and some buttons could’ve been freed up to give us a “favorites” menu for optimizing a more personalized summoner.

Fortunately, the story sings. This game is a miraculous fusion of the Switch games’ freedom and the more directed, procedural pacing of classic titles like Link to the Past. Dungeons are filled with keys, gates and the occasional miniboss, and solved by finding some power or echo within them. The dungeons use the classic template as guidelines, but developer Grezzo and Nintendo aren’t afraid to weave out of it here and there.

I also hesitate to call this game a 2D title. It’s only the top-down camera that gives us the illusion of two dimensions, but this is a fully 3D environment with physics that follows natural law (fire melts ice, burns grass, etc.), allowing for the kind of free-form play in Breath of the Wild. In the larger games, the sky wasn’t even the limit for navigation. But with a restricted camera angle, the franchise is finally able to revisit and refine its immaculate dungeon formula it once abandoned. That decision also helps the game return to more linear storytelling, with charming narrative arcs unfolding in each region, complete with new unique characters. Through each quest, Zelda helps people become the best versions of themselves, such as a young village chief hoping to live up to the legacy of his late father, or two friends mending a long-standing conflict.

To get a game this innovative, charming and polished over a year after the remarkable Tears is miraculous. I can’t wait to see what the next Zelda game learns from this one. Its echoes will ring long after the credits roll.

Platform: Nintendo Switch

Online: tinyurl.com/phdsy62c