Reloading: Hyrule Warriors! Come out to play!

I think I’m in a very action-game mood currently. I raced through both Bayonetta games with full intent to go back to the second to unlock more goodies. I have a review here of Hyrule Warriors and I’ll have another for Sonic Boom here sometime soon as well. Maybe I’ll get the nerve to jump back into Metal Gear Rising here in the next week or so and see if I can beat that boss I was having trouble with. Oh, right, I was here to review that Hyrule Warriors.

For a bit of backstory, I’ve never played a Dynasty Warriors game which is what Hyrule Warriors basically is. For those also unfamiliar with that style of game, Dynasty Warriors is a series of game where you play Feudal Japanese Warlords (normally) and fight lots of enemies (most of which are easy to just eliminate) with the goal of taking the enemy keep or beating the enemy boss. Along the way there are keeps you may have to acquire for side-objectives or just to help spread your forces out more. If you lose your base or lose a story-vital unit you lose the mission.

Hyrule Warriors is basically just that with Legend of Zelda skin placed over it. For those unfamiliar with my thoughts on Zelda, I suppose I’ll make it clear here. I’m not a fan of the Legend of Zelda series. It’s a series that I enjoy the visuals, music, and lore but I can’t stand the actual plots or gameplay to any real degree. But since Hyrule Warriors alters the plot and gameplay to fit a Dynasty Warriors style game, does that make it better than the average Zelda game?

Yes and no. It improve on a lot of the imperfections I’ve come to point out over the many years of trying to enjoy most Zelda-games. But those “improvements” leave themselves open to their own criticisms that make it hard for me to say whether the changes are objectively better or just creating new problems overall. I suppose the good news is this game is non-canonical so that fans won’t get upset about it ruining the lore or dragging down the main series (if they don’t like it, I mean). But let’s get started.

Hyrule Warriors basically plays out like “Zelda’s Greatest Hits” but with a Dynasty Warriors cover band if that makes sense. An evil witch named Cia uses dark magic to gather magic-balls from different parts of time (the Zelda Timeline) to unite evil forces in hopes of getting her hands on Link. I haven’t any idea why she wants to be with a man who has the personality of a brick, but perhaps she has low self-esteem, which explains why she barely wears any clothes.

Link along with Sheik (who is revealed to be Zelda, spoilers), Impa, and Lana (new girl) must travel across the timelines (with magic) to close the gateways Cia’s opened up, defeat the evil forces, and end Cia’s mad plans for Link’s cucco (if you get my metaphor). You’ll fight villains from Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, and Ocarina of Time (so not the good N64 Zelda game). There are many token references to previous games in the weapons, certain attacks, and music. This is literally a game designed to appeal to Zelda fans and if you are an overzealous fan of Zelda, you’ll basically get your money’s worth.

Gameplay wise, this game has a lot of differences from your average Zelda game (obviously, since it’s Dynasty Warriors). Starting with combat, it isn’t just the usual lock-on, throw a boomerang, and finish with a jump-slash. This game requires utilizing various combos to eliminate crowds of enemies. Within the crowds, you’ll have bigger enemies who can be summoners, keep-bosses, and just big enemies who will be a pain in the ass if you don’t deal with them fast.

Combos, unfortunately, don’t feel all that great. They’re all relatively samey feeling, which makes combat overall feel incredibly repetitive. The good thing is the ability to play as different characters (except for certain chapters where you MUST play as Link because it’s a Zelda game). Interestingly enough, many support characters offer more fun ways to play and more interesting combos to watch than the main characters of Link or Zelda. I imagine this is because they want Link’s moveset to be as referential to his usual moves in his usual games, but that just hampers him to be slow, boring, and unfun to play. Zelda’s a bit better, but I’d rather play as Impa, Darunia, or Fi (yes, Fi is actually enjoyable to play as).

Regardless, combos just don’t have that much variety to them. And not having the massive combo list of Bayonetta makes discovering a new combo less thrilling. I get having lots of combos is kind of pointless when you only use certain ones. But accidentally discovering one during a fight or practicing is what made it more interesting because you might rotate through a few moves only to find a combo that looks or feels much better. Hyrule Warriors doesn’t have that as much, which is disappointing, but not a deal breaker. 

In the fights, you must go to certain areas known as Keeps (think of it like point-capturing from Team Fortress 2 if you’ve never Dynasty Warrior-ed before). You must clear out the Keep of its boss and then the Keep is allied with your team. There are also outposts with the same rules, just smaller amounts of units to fight to get ownership. You can lose Keeps during the fight (and will) as certain enemies will appear under certain circumstances to wreck your streak of conquest.

The problem with this is that while you’re fighting with an army and even other named characters like Zelda, Impa, Lana, Darunia, Midna, Ruto, Fi, and Sheik you are basically doing everything. For some reason no one can fight without you and even if you are there, they aren’t necessarily good at fighting either. Logically speaking, you should be able to steamroll through the opposition by the end with a good team of fighters you take on the final castles with.

But your AI teammates will lose keeps constantly and instead of being able to constantly push forward, you have to backtrack a lot to restore keeps or rescue allies. Backtracking? Shit, I guess this is a Zelda game after all. I get that bosses require your attention, but in the early game I remember Impa could capture a Keep while I was capturing another. Nearing the end, she had to retreat while I was fighting the boss because apparently she couldn’t keep up. That’s fine, Impa. You just rest while I basically do everything.

This can be mitigated with Co-Op, but due to the limited amount of time I had access to this game, I wasn’t able to actually test this theory out. But I imagine that dividing the problems between two actual people instead of just the one would make all the major issues less… well… major. No to mention fighting bosses would be more of a cakewalk… again. Theoretically.

There’s also elements of shopping and crafting (though you can’t sell excess goods, which is unfortunate). Crafting is the main thing you do in between missions where you can craft “badges” which up your stats or resistances for certain characters to make future missions easier. Training also allows you to level up your characters to match the level of your max-leveled character. Getting rupees and materials to craft is relatively simple as you’ll get them naturally throughout your fights so there’s no worries. By the end of the game, I was swimming in rupees, but lacking all the materials needed to make certain badges… which kinda sucked.

But the badges, from what I’ve noticed, don’t really feel like the add much to the game. If there is a buff, it’s hard to really notice. Plus near everyone has the same options for stat buffs but I feel this is somewhat two-dimensional and doesn’t really feel interesting or fun to me. I think a more appropriate method would have been a legitimate RPG level-up system where you can add points to certain stats as you play. Or maybe stats just level up based on actions (lots of running means more speed, lots of attacking means more strength, etc).

After beating the main game (where you defeat Cia), the story continues into the brief “Ganondorf” campaign where you play as the best looking version of Ganondorf the series has seen so far. (Seriously, Nintendo, either make this game canonical or just reuse this Ganondorf in a canonical game). You also play as the other villains in the game Zant and Ghirahim as you try to take Hyrule for yourselves now that Cia is gone. This leads to another campaign in which you (as the heroes) fight Ganon and company and save the day… again.

While the story is basically recycled from previous games, I would like to say this is the first game where we can play as Ganondorf and the villains. Sure, we can also play as Zelda for the first time, but Ganondorf is the most interesting character since Nintendo never likes letting us play the villains (waiting for Pokemon: Rocket version). While his campaign has its own challenge to it and Ganondorf’s moveset is actually quite fun to mess around with, it doesn’t make up for the game’s lack of excitement. As Ganondorf you re-battle bosses from previous battles in the game for no logical reason and you revisit maps to fight the heroes who somehow lose only to challenge you again in the post-post game chapters. Also, you’re only two allies are Zant and Ghirahim and both of them are underwhelming characters who also can’t seem to hold their own in a fight to save their lives, making Ganon do pretty much everything.

What I like about this game is that it takes a series not known for fast-paced gameplay or action and adds loads of it. In a lot of ways, it works. I enjoy just how much faster the fighting is and how big the fights actually feel in comparison to the slow-paced one-on-one battles of usual Zelda games. That said, there’s not as much tension in these fights because so many of the enemies are weak and easy to kill. The only times when they aren’t easy are when they’re bosses. And it was really only one case where the boss had doppelgangers and could attack me from off camera.

But the story is still mostly a Zelda-affair. New villain arrives to get a hold of Link’s metaphorical sword for some reason. New villain turns out to be a puppet of Ganondorf. Minion is defeated and then Ganondorf returns to do a bad. I love Ganondorf, but this is really standard and at this point, Zelda games don’t feel like they’re trying when the plot is just the same as the last game or two. (Barring certain entries like Skyward Sword or Majora’s Mask). But since this was a game full of references to please the fans, I suppose this should be too much of a surprise.

Overall, this isn’t a bad game by any means. If I were more of a Zelda fan, I’d probably enjoy it more. If I were more of a Dynasty Warriors fan, I’d probably have lots of fun. But as an action game or a fantasy game, it just feels lackluster. Why can’t I get a fast-travel option to help allies on the other side of the map instead of taking forever to run my fat stupid ass down there? Why can’t I switch control of characters during a battle so I can assist in multiple areas? Why can’t I just have better AI that knows how to fight?

There are things this improves upon the standard Zelda formula, but, as I said, new problems crop up that need to be dealt with and some of the old problems of Zelda still remain. So, no, I don’t think the mixture of Zelda and Dynasty Warriors makes a “better” game, but it’s different and I like enough of what they’re offering to want to play through the whole thing. But there are better action games out there and had I not just finished one of them recently, I probably wouldn’t have been much kinder to Hyrule Warriors. 

That’s all for today. If you enjoyed this review and want to see more content like it, please be sure to like, comment, share, and subscribe. Did you play Hyrule Warriors? What’d did you think of it? What do you think of Zelda games in general (I’m sure we’ll talk more about that soon)? What are your thoughts on Dynasty Warriors? Please be sure to let us know in the comments below. See ya next time!