Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

It’s raining here in the southland and that means we get to indulge our laziness a little extra by firing up some co-op Hyrule Warriors. Getting through the tutorial we’re able to split-screen some missions and the performance has been rock solid. It also turns out that I’m the number one Mineru fan - she’s so lanky and her fighting style weird. I love summoning a giant Zonai murder car and bowling through a huge crowd of enemies, or setting up a bomb and whacking it like I’m playing stickball. She’s just a lot of fun so far.

We’ve been introduced to who we’re referring to as “Finn & Jake” - a fake Link construct who has been saddled with a little buddy, the unfortunately named Calamo. This team up is cute and I’m excited to learn more but they do feel straight out of Adventure Time.

Oh hey speaking of characters, what the fuck is this thing?

We’ve been co-oping this now for about 4 days and it’s very good. I have some complaints which I’ll get into but first I want to talk about the things that I’m enjoying. The story it’s laying out, “Zelda in Ancient Hyrule” is great. When they planted the seeds for this in Tears of the Kingdom they left a lot to be filled in later, they clearly knew they were going to put this into production and the story lends itself to be more cannon than the alternate timeline, cute baby guardian robot, multi-verse thing that was happening in Age of Calamity. We have some new characters that are good, including the unfortunately named “Calamo”, and the newly dubbed Knight Construct.

I don’t want to go too deep into the upgrade process because, to me, it feels fairly inconsequential. As you collect material and unlock new areas on the map icons will pop up allowing you to spend resources to gain a new skill or combo for specific characters. This ends up just being a chore to dance around the map in between battles clicking the A button a bunch until no more icons are lit up. The weapons upgrades, I’m going to be honest, I haven’t really spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. You get materials and you spend them 5-at-a-time to level up weapons. So I’ve just been doing that as quickly as possible to keep everyone mostly up-to-snuff.

My biggest complaint so far has been the battles! They are quick, short and feel very much the same. In older games you’d have a big map and lots of outposts and generals that were in trouble and areas that were threatened to fall and you do get that sometimes, mostly with the bigger story battles - though they’ve rarely felt frantic and urgent - the in-between missions that unlock new parts of the land have largely been ‘capture 2 areas, beat 1 big guy.’ Just a couple of minutes! I’m hoping as we open up more of the world the content will get meatier. I liked the sprawling battles of the past games and hope those make a return.

Oh my god why am I talking about any of this when we could be talking about the best kept secret in all of gaming. This game basically has secret Star Fox baked into it. Because the Knight Construct can turn into whatever the plot may require, he’s a perfect candidate to soar through the sky islands while Calamo blasts acorns at keese or aerocudos or gleeoks. I love these levels and hope they expand on what we’ve seen in later games.

We’re still playing a bit of Hyrule Warriors everyday! I’ll be honest, it’s honestly pretty samey-samey. The only saving grace is that every once in a while some random character they made up just for this game will join your roster. And sometimes, those characters are Ronza…

And sometimes those characters are fat little gourmands that kick ass…

It’s fun! But there isn’t a lot of challenge for multiplayer on normal so we’ve finally pumped it up to “hard”. The jump wasn’t too bad, we had to get used to sharing our 4 total heals but after a battle or two we were back. I’m still lamenting the lack of real challenges and longer levels in between the story missions but it hasn’t been that big of a speedbump.

After a mini-honeymoon and a couple of days of “vacation from our vacation” we dipped our toes back into HW. We continued our press through the small story missions and then after a few of those we again did a big story, and then the map filled up with chores to click and we clicked those and then we did a few small missions and then a big story mission and then the map filled up with chores …

We have finished Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment! At least we’ve finished all the missions leading up to the final story mission. It actually became quite surprising to not see any smaller, orange missions flashing, luring us in to a 3 to 5 minute long scuffle. The disparity between missions sizes in this game is large; the story missions will be multi part missions with a dozen of allies on the map, spanning across all three areas (sky, surface & depths) serving you cut scenes and character changes and just when you think its over it’s starting back up! They are exciting and cinematic, and the stakes feel real and high. But then you do a side mission and it becomes this 3-5 minute long formulaic romp through Hyrule where you clear out two encampments, then a big guy appears, which you finish off, then another big guy appears and you are done. By the end of this game we were using our weakest characters because we wanted to ramp up the challenge a little bit without going into ultra-hard territory. Stages that would suggest level 55+ we were doing with sub-40 guys. Our hypothesis, which would be easy to test to a conclusion if I was not already eying my backlog like a Tex Avery wolf eyes a curvy human woman, is that because we are playing this cooperatively, the game is not rebalanced. Even on hard we’re playing on easy mode.

The story is good and just engaging enough. Considering the length of time this game took us to complete (just over a month of on-again off-again) it was impactful enough to keep us from forgetting the big story beats, but not so important that it ever felt confusing or foreign when we didn’t remember something. But the story isn’t the reason you play these games, you play them because you get to air juggle 100 bokoblins in the air while they all scream bloody murder. You play them because you can be Mineru, sister of the ancient king of Hyrule, who spawns zonai constructs ad infinitum and drops giant spiked bombs on bad guys while serving cunt. You play this because you want to run around in a Zelda game playing as a rito or a goron or a sad fish girl and make Ganon’s minions pay for their crimes. And it works, it’s satisfying and runs incredibly surprisingly well. This game only ever stumbles when we’re in co-op, in the same area, fighting separate giant bosses (like a hinox or a big boss bokoblin) and the two of us would use a sync strike with nearby companions. This scenario would drag the framerate down, but nowhere near to what you’d expect from a warriors game.

Now that its over, we’re talking about what else we can have in the background waiting for us. What other coop games have a pick-up-and-play style that doesn’t require a lot of investment for maximum reward. God the financials of Hyrule Warriors really are in the players favor. Its a 60$ game, there is about 40 hours or more of base content, way more if you get into all the incredibly specific tasks they ask of you; things like “reflect 5 enemie attacks while in flight mode as Mineru” or “Use 2 lightning attacks near a body of water as Raphica.” These are almost like achievement level asks but they unlock rare material used in upgrading your characters and gaining favor of the regions on the map. They’ve also just dropped a big content update which added in more to do. Most of this update is not for me. It’s new weapons and unique skills, and what I want is more battles, big ones, with lots of requirements for completion. I want to have to repel enemies from encampments and escort people across the maps and unlock pathways and have a timer counting down - big bold missions that seem insurmountable that require me to switch characters to quickly move around the map because this general is in trouble and we can’t lose them. This is what’s missing from Age of Imprisonment, a challenge beyond the enemies who are just damage sponges. Much of the Zonai tools you can deploy help mitigate the armor barriers anyway! You can pull out a flamethrower, drop it on the ground and most enemies are pretty unhappy about that! It turns out being set on fire is also a source of displeasure in this world. So go ahead and just burn them to the ground! And when two people are doing it hoo boy watch out. It kind of becomes a hack or feels like a cheat that you can just set down these flame throwers without spending considerable battery and it immobilizes even the more powerful Lynels.

There were some boss fights that were tense and fun. The evil version of the mysterious construct was actually quite difficult, though we thought we would need to restart this but we squeeked through without failing. One interesting thing that both Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild could have learned from was the way they handled enemy variations. They started adding onto enemies elements or gloom. So now you’re fighting an Ice Hinox, or a Fire Big Boss Bokoblin. They had some new attacks and it kept things feeling fresh. They didn’t get fun with it, though, and like throw a battlefield just full of octoroks or swarms of fire keese or give you the mission to kill 100 peblit in 5 minutes. These would have made the interstitial missions more interesting and memorable.