Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Review

I'm not really a Zelda fan however I did play Hyrule Warriors a while ago and I remember kind of enjoying that, I have heard some say Age of Calamity is the better game so I decided to buy it and play that. While AoC has some improvements over the first game it is hindered by a story that fails to be anything other than a happy ending and a long and bloated campaign that could've ended at least 5 if not 10 hours earlier.

From a presentation standpoint AoC is an improvement over HW in that there are way more cutscenes and there is quite a lot of voice acting here. The first half of the story is pretty interesting especially considering I didn't know too much of the spoilers and I thought at first it was going to be to Zelda BOTW what Halo Reach was to Halo CE and Crisis Core is to Final Fantasy 7. How at first, it was going to start off as hopeful and optimistic but as the game went on, slowly the bad guys would start winning and it would eventually set up BOTW, like how Reach did with CE. Zelda was slowly had to win over everyone, how her father "dying" and the Divine Beasts being taken over meant that it was going to end where BOTW would begin but no, Nintendo doesn't like the idea of a Downer Ending so they came up with some weird time travel plot twist instead where the good guys win.

So now, the very premise of AoC being a prequel to BOTW is pretty much a complete and total farce. It starts to make me wonder what even is the point of it since now all it does establish that the Calamity Ganon in the AoC timeline is a weakling and the Ganon in BOTW is retroactively more interesting since he actually succeeded in conquering BOTW's version of Hyrule.

As a result, by having the 2nd half of the story esstentially be defeating Calamity Ganon, it bloats the game's length and this has a major effect on the campaign itself.

Now this transitions me over to gameplay. At first, there are some geniune improvements. NPCs won't get you game overs nearly as often. The regular enemies are pretty easy to beat after all this is what the musou genre is known for, the various mini bosses are enjoyable to fight due to multiple ways of getting the stagger meter down. You can hit specific weak spots on them to get a circular meter to zero which allows them to be staggered but there are other ways to do it. For example, the flurry rush from BOTW is back and it encourages the player want to make "perfect dodges" because it allows you to damage the stagger meter on mini bosses without hitting them in specific weakspots. There is also elemental weaknesses which can be accessed by holding down the L button which allows the player to also weaken the stagger the meter without hitting weak spots depending on what element they are weak to.

Ability uses like cryosis, bombs and magnesis from BOTW can be quickly accessed by holding the R button and when timed right, you can damage and stun the mini bosses for a bit so in a lot of ways there is a decent number of ways these mini bosses can be beaten. Two other improvements is that healing items like apples can be accessed using the L shortcut on elemental attacks, the game also has difficulty options with the easy mode being pretty accomadating.

For all these improvements, there are multiple things that hold AoC back by a long shot. First you can't buy apples from the menu and it seemingly was added as DLC which is bizarre. The game doesn't explain it's systems or mechanics that well particularly involving weapon fusing which is something you will need to get through later parts of the game.

Two of the biggest issues it has is the camera and the especially the reused mini bosses. The former is so bad that it reminded me why I strongly dislike player controlled cameras in 3D beat em ups. They especially get bad when you fight flying, big or fast moving enemies since the camera has a hard to keeping a decent view of the player and the enemies surronding him, the lock on tracks the enemy but it say if an enemy starts attacking especially a fast one, the lock on will track him and while the character is closing the distance, the camera will follow him. With bigger enemies, he will take up so much of the screen making dodging a guessing game since so little of the screen is given to the player to reliable dodge and attack. It especially gets bad in tight spaces since the camera will just have Link be in first person while the interiors are covering his character model.

Then there are the reused mini bosses, here is much of AoC, fight Bobokins, Lizalfos, Hinox, Guardians, Moblins, Lynels, Talus, and Wizzorbes and different color variations of them for 20 hours and then have more of them pop with way more HP and just have the challenge be from being HP sponges. As a result, I lowered the difficulty to easy so I can kill them faster because adding more tough enemies with lots of HP is the only way the game knew how to add challenge.

The Divine Beast sections while really fun at first to reign fire down on weaker enemies gets boring when you do it a second time since these sections are too basic and dull to be something worth doing a second time, adding a timer just makes these less of a power fantasy since know you can't just win by spamming the various attack buttons, luckily when as the timer goes down the places you need to destroy do get marked but why weren't these just added to begin with? The lack of commitment is confusing. 

Overall, AoC as a whole, I question it's existence and what even was the point so the gameplay isn't very good and the story doesn't even commit to the interesting premise it has.