The Legend of the Zelda is a series I never really liked or ever got the hype for, I always try to play a Zelda game and start getting my expectations way too high that the games are going to be the epic masterpieces the gaming community hypes them up as and that never happens. I randomly bought Hyrule Warriors because I thought maybe the change to the musou style of game and it's style of gameplay and combat I prefer over the mainline Zelda series and plus it was a random game I wanted to play on the Switch and in spite of all this what did I think of the game?
I kind of enjoyed it and had more fun with it than I thought I was going to but it's nothing special which is fine, the fact that I even got to the end and even got some enjoyment out of a Zelda game and a musou game which the latter I get some casual enjoyment out of is impressive enough as is. My big gripe and prevents me from saying with a straight face that I like it without saying "but" is that I really think the game should've ended after Cia was defeated, more on that later.
For a guy who isn't very familar with musou games and his only experience with the genre thus far is One Piece Pirate Warriors 4, I had some fun with this game for primarily three reasons, the first is that the game checkpoints during the main missions and the checkpoints are frequent enough to avoid having me get frustrated and quit the game, the story while Zelda's story is nothing special, it gave better contextualization for the gameplay and didn't expect me to know beforehand what was going on like Pirate Warriors 4, and the Twilight Princess art style I really like and prefer by a large country mile over One Piece's.
Comprisons aside while the musou style of game is infamous for being button mashy and pressing x to win and while that is kind of true, I did like the Zelda shake ups to the formula did kind of help at breaking things up at least for up to when Cia is defeated. I like how certain enemies can't be killed by sword and you need to switch to bombs for eye statues, arrows for the poisonous plants, and hookshot for the dragons.
The bosses in general can't be beaten through conventional sword attacks and require item use in order for them to be beaten which somewhat helps at making combat less stale as well as the combat while simple does a good job at making the game feel like an okay power fantasy of killing horders of enemies.
What also helps with the game is that all the enemies have stamina bars of sorts where you can perform a critical attack to do massive damage to them which helps gives the combat be a little more dynamic than "press x to win".
However with all that said there are number of issues I have, one being the camera which ranges from, "serviceable" to "where the hell am I attacking?" So many times the camera gives an okay view on the action where I have a solid view of where I am in relation to the enemies then at other times in closed spaces the camera will have a hard time keeping up with the action or if I am striking at areas behind me the camera, the camera really feels like it doesn't do the best job at keeping up with the active inputs I am doing.
Another issue is that, the game's difficulty rarely if ever comes from your HP reaching zero, it comes from how inept your allies are. So many of the game overs I got was because my allies' HP was zero and I didn't come fast enough in time to refill their health when they were at critical. I don't so much feel like my weaknesses come from skill, they come from me babysitting inept friendly AI. 95% of all the fail states I got were because my allies' health was at critical and since there is no voice acting in the game and HW you got to pay attention to the map screen at all times in order to get anywhere, this got annoying. If the game didn't checkpoint as well as it did, I would've given up on HW because of this issue alone.
Final issue is that I wish the game just ended a couple levels earlier after Cia was beaten. The levels with Ganon felt dull and padded the game length since the game is pulling a Mortal Kombat 11 Aftermath and you are playing as the villains undoing what the heroes did earlier in the game, this would've been fine as say maybe a DLC chapter but Cia's defeat geniunely felt like the story wrapped up but instead it still kept going plus there is not enough new thrown at you except for maybe some generic boss rushes to really justifying adding more content and the bosses that changes up the pace in an interesting way is the same bosses fought earlier in the game and how did Ganon get access to all the same items Link had? This whole section soured my opinion on the game and if they were gone I would geniunely reccomend the title.
Overall, coming from someone who never liked the Zelda series and someone who isn't passionate about musou games, I was surprised to get some enjoyment out of Hyrule Warriors, the game isn't great but my expectations were low.
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