Alora Fane

I enjoyed this AAA hack-and-slash Breath of the Wild spinoff more than I expected to! (This might contain some spoilers, if screenshots of some playable characters count as such for you.)

I've been meaning to write about this for ages since I finished it at least a week ago, but I keep putting it off due to lack of time and mental energy. I want to at least write something before starting another game though! So...

Summary

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is a somewhat mindless hack-and-slash game which reuses the gorgeous design style - and many assets - from Breath of the Wild. It acts as a kind of prequel, in that it's set 100 years previous to BotW, though its story is more like an alternate reality.

I found out about it from Reddit a couple of months ago, where it was described as having a story that was a prequel to Breath of the Wild. I liked BotW a lot, and I know there's a sequel in the works, so I thought this might tie the two together in some way and was curious to give it a go. I knew there was another Hyrule Warriors game a few years ago, but I've never played it. Was it essentially a reskinned version of a game called Dynasty Warriors? Was that the one that was marketed as a realistic experience set in ancient Japan where you also fought giant enemy crabs you could hit the weak points of for massive damage? Are these things related at all?!? I could google it but I won't. YOU CAN'T MAKE ME.

Games like this are annoyingly expensive considering my money struggles - it was like £50 or something - but I've been so stressed lately that I wanted something I could play on my Switch away from my computer which I wouldn't have to analyse like a competitor, as I would with an indie game. And it did serve that purpose well!

According to the Switch's annoyingly vague hours played counters, I finished it in around 60 hours, after trying to do every single side quest... which I didn't even accomplish in the end just because a couple would have been too tedious. (I also see that I've spent a ludicrous amount of time on the few Switch games I have? Like over 110 hours on Animal Crossing, which I feel like I fairly quickly quit!)

Gameplay

I have no idea how the other Warriors games played so I don't know if this is essentially just an existing gameplay style with a licensed paint job to drive sales - like all the "Pokemon Tetris" kinds of games, or at least Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Pokemon Conquest, etc - in which case I suppose the mechanics would have been honed before development on this began and familiar to players of previous installments. They were of course new for me, especially since this isn't a genre I ever play.

The game is broken into missions, in which you control a character on a big 'battlefield' (though they're more like rooms connected by corridors instead of one big open space) full of enemies. They come in two types: little craplings that come in swarms and which you cut down like blades of grass (as shown there), and big boss-type monsters with enormous health bars which you have to use at least a bit of strategy against.

I've never played a game with so many small enemies like this - the closest I could recall was a single scene in Kingdom Hearts 2, which felt like a big deal at the time - and it sort of cheapened the value of monster species that felt more menacing back in BotW (in that, three Bokoblins would take effort to deal with, while here you just cut down like thirty in a single slash). But I suppose it also gave a visceral thrill of power?

There was some silliness with it where sometimes you'd have to fight a scaled-up, stronger version of one of the craplings, which was absurd for these human yiga clan enemies. Made me laugh the first time I saw it.

There are only a handful of different monsters, all taken from BotW, and most missions involve fighting them - or palette swaps of them - over and over. I didn't mind this really, it was fine, though I did wonder what other people might think.

Oh, except for the Talus monsters; they were originally designed with BotW's climbing system in mind (you had to scale their stony bodies to hack away at a crystal on top), but here they kept that weakness despite the absence of that mechanic, making them obnoxious to fight. I hated facing those things.

You have a roster of playable characters (is this common in games these days?), most from BotW; I knew before I started that I'd get to play as the four historical Champions only seen in flashbacks in BotW, but I was pleasantly surprised by some of the others who became playable! Even if it's completely absurd that some would. Others felt like they were crammed in because they were in BotW even though they made no sense to be included here... though I'll get to that more later.

All of the characters have essentially the same mechanics: you can press the Y button repeatedly to do a combo, or press X at a certain point of that combo to end it and execute a different special attack depending on how many times you'd pressed Y. I found that interesting in its elegant simplicity and potential for a lot of variation; seemed a great way to make simple button-mashing varied and interesting.

All the characters can also use the Sheikah slate 'rune' abilities - Magnesis, Stasis, Cryonis, and Remote Bombs - which have essentially the same effect as in BotW, though they're mostly used to counter boss enemies' strong attacks: an icon appears above their head, and you have to use the corresponding rune.

You also have a big special attack that you have to charge up by... inflicting damage or something, I was never sure exactly how the bar filled.

So it's simple enough, and I'm glad the characters all play roughly the same since it meant I could easily switch between them rather than focusing entirely on one and neglecting the rest. I did end up preferring a handful in the end, though mostly due to who they were rather than particular gameplay mechanics. There are subtle differences between how their combos and runes worked, though, which keep everyone feeling at least a bit different, and which more hardcore gamers would probably use to rank them.

The game has a few big story missions, each interspersed with cutscenes, but between them you can also do shorter side missions, by selecting icon nodes which appeared on a map of Hyrule from BotW. Some are relatively quick battles - some requiring you to play as certain characters, which I liked since it encouraged building them all up - while others require you to pay out inventory trash that you'd accumulated from other missions.

At first I found the sheer number of these extremely overwhelming and intended to just ignore most of them, though as I got further in, I came to appreciate them more and tried to do as many as I could. The ones that required items could get annoying though as it meant I had to grind some previously-finished battles, which felt like a chore.

I mentioned not finishing 100%; this was because the game reused the hidden koroks thing from BotW (which I felt suited an exploration game well, but just felt inappropriate here). Koroks dropped korok seeds, and it seems you had to do at least some korok hunting to get enough seeds to complete all the quests that required the seeds. And while you could unlock an upgrade that showed the (fairly pointless) treasure chests as map icons, there wasn't any to show koroks. I looked up maps online, but couldn't be bothered with the tedium of it.

Most characters have a single weapon type - except two who have more than one - and can acquire more weapons from battles. I found this weapon acquisition system generally annoying, and confusing at first. Basically each weapon you get has a type (for most characters, it seems to be one of three qualities, like a "Bronze Sword", "Silver Sword", "Gold Sword" kind of thing), and an attack value which I think is related to this, though it seems to be random for each individual weapon. They also may or may not have a 'seal', which is a bonus like "Strong-Attack Damage: +2%". These effects and their numerical value seem to be random too.

BotW had a limited number of inventory slots, and this game copies that by giving each character a limited number of slots too. It gets so annoying though, as you have a bunch of characters, and typically get a handful of weapons for several of them at the end of a battle... which you then have to sort through selling excess ones because you have no slots free, which is annoying since each individual weapon is different so you have to decide which ones you want to keep. This was especially annoying at first since I didn't understand the seals system so I had no idea which ones were worth keeping (I got used to it later).

You can also combine weapons (eventually), which is conceptually ludicrous ("I, a random blacksmith, will merge your Master Sword with these tree branches and mops so then it'll allow you to dodge more effectively!"), and which I hated for much of the game. Weapons also have a level and XP, and when you combine them, you select a recipient weapon and then up to five others to essentially convert into XP for that weapon. Levels increase the weapon's attack value, but higher levels also mean that the weapon can have multiple seals, which are inherited from component weapons. So if you combine a Master Sword with "Special-Attack Charge Rate: +5%" with a Tree Branch with "Perfect-Dodge Timing Window: +5%", and that brings the Master Sword up to level 5, it'll end up with both of those seals... with a little percentage bonus to both since they both have the same shaped icon. Obviously. But if you combine two with the same seal (eg "Perfect-Dodge Timing Window +5%"), instead of getting a result with +10% or something, it'd have that same seal listed twice, filling up two slots.

It's also very difficult to remove seals once added, and some seals seem to be unique so if you ignorantly add them to a weapon before you know their worth (as I did), you have no chance to change them around. My Master Sword ended up with a seal I didn't really want on it after testing it out, but it felt too rare to just lose forever - I think it was from a weapon I got as a bonus for having BotW save data - so I stuck with it. I've been playing around with systems that allow you to reverse decisions in my own games because of frustrations like this.

The whole system is simple enough once you get used to it, and it allows for some ridiculously overpowered weapons if you master it, but overall I just found it annoying, and thought a lot about how people would probably criticise me if I tried to include something like that in a game of mine! Bleh.

You also got to control the Divine Beasts - the mobile dungeons from BotW - for some missions, which was an interesting idea in theory, though I found the execution a bit of a chore and put off most of the optional missions with them until the end. I like the cyan UI hearts; nice attention to detail (but shouldn't [spoiler] also have cyan hearts??).

Story

The story was advertised as a kind of prequel to Breath of the Wild - or at least that's how I heard about it - though I suppose it becomes a kind of alternate universe? Which is better, I suppose, since it doesn't meant you have to play this to make sense of BotW2.

There's at least some care to keep lore consistent with BotW, though I also found some things annoying because they clashed with the lore of that game. It's something that was on my mind constantly during the early stages; "this feels wrong!", it felt like some intruder wearing the face of someone I liked to trick me... though eventually I suppose I got used to it? Or something??

The game involves time travel, for example, right from the start, with this little robot - called things like 'the little one' for some reason even though it apparently has a (ostensibly meaningful?) name, the eventual reveal of which was a "huh? Why was that a big deal?" moment for me - travelling 100 years back from the BotW time period for... reasons, probably, where it meets up with Link and Zelda and very much forces its way into the plot. It grew on me eventually to the point where I regard it fondly now, but I remember at the start it feeling like they'd crammed in this new character and focused everything around it even though it was what nobody would be playing the game to see. I wonder whether it might have been perceived as ∞ The Scrappy ∞ - an obnoxious new character shoehorned in and which everyone (except the audience) immediately loves - though I have no idea what the fandom thinks of it since I avoid all that.

There were a few things which were basically stuff from the BotW - like the emerging Sheikah towers - happening now, 100 years in the past, because... that little guardian affected the timeline? Or something? It spoiled any sense of immersion since it was obvious they were just including everything familiar even if it made no sense to do so.

I was also bothered by the drastic clash between characters' abilities in this new gameplay style, and their established abilities in BotW; things like the mowing down of craplings, or being able to fight on equal footing as what should be far more competent characters, as I said before. Or everyone having access to the Sheikah slate (did they all have their own??). Being able to play as Zelda - for example - was great, but it didn't make much sense for her to spend so long worrying about her combat incompetence and wanting Link and others to protect her when she was just as capable as they were! At one point a mission even required escorting and protecting her even though just moments before I'd been controlling her to take down huge bosses and swarms of bokoblins without a problem... Oh well, gameplay and story segregation is nothing new!

Zelda had a completely different arc here which was satisfying in a self-contained sense, so I'm wondering how that'll affect how players perceive her in whatever they decide to do in BotW2.

Oh, it also bothered me that the game was set in the exact same region as BotW, with which many players had become intimately familiar after roaming around every nook and cranny, but I don't know if the battlefields in this exactly matched up with the geography in that. I suppose they felt close enough - or I didn't remember BotW clearly enough - to get a pass from me, though I did wonder whether other people might have been bothered by any discrepancies!

Visuals

Many of the assets were directly taken from BotW, it looked like, though every single one of the models had a lot of complex (and highly competent) animations that made me hope the animators really enjoyed their jobs since they must have taken ages! I suppose having the models mostly made freed up time for adding more animations, though.

The general design style of BotW was kept in terms of character shaders etc (which I greatly appreciated since they look amazing; I definitely prefer this look to gritty realism), as well as general UI design. A lot of work obviously went into determining that art direction for BotW, so it's interesting seeing them reaping more benefits from that here.

There were cutscenes throughout the story missions which felt very much like the ones in BotW. I was particularly impressed by the subtleties of facial expressions!

...I was going to include a particularly emotive one, but instead here's Zelda experiencing some self-fondling bliss while Link stares into the camera and mouthlessly says the artful and memorable dialogue at the bottom. My favourite scene of the game by far.

I took hundreds of screenshots (917, apparently) because every screen felt like a work of art, so I'd say I probably liked the visuals, maybe, perhaps.

I like these iconic, abstract representations of characters - which from what I can tell are identical to some used in BotW - which were used for the quest icons and to show them on this loading screen (speaking of which, there were a lot of obnoxiously long load times).

Music

This is perhaps my favourite part of the whole experience, and a big reason I'm glad I played it!

The music is very competent, as is to be expected, and it's more... standard, I suppose you could say, than some of the more abstract, impressionistic music in Breath of the Wild. That is, I can imagine it being more widely accessible. Lots of intensity and no dead air. It does recycle a lot of the musical motifs from BotW, though, in a way that I found impressively skillful rather than heavy-handed.

I noticed that the composer(s?) had a clear habit of using what I'd know as ∞ ostinato ∞, but which less Classical-influenced people might call a riff or hook or something? Repeating melodic (or rhythmic, though in this case they were melodic) patterns. They were used well, and they're not something I make much use of myself, so this music made me want to try them in my own.

One thing that sort of bothered me is that this - like many modern games - used dynamic music, which I didn't actually notice while playing, though the the OST has a couple of variations of each particular track. Annoying for adding them to a playlist for when I work, since I'd either have to pick one (and when they both sound so similar it's hard to choose) or add both...

You first encounter the character Revali - who's a competitive arsehole - in the form of a battle at the end of his stage, so both his stage and this battle have different tracks that are listed separately, and each has variations. I liked these pieces so much that I went out of my way to manually combine them in Audacity to create a 13-minute-long barrage of intensity that pretty much gives me mental orgasms when listening to it; it's one of the best pieces of music I've ever heard! Its ostinato has been stuck in my mind for days... It feels like great fortune if a game has one truly great piece I'll end up listening to for years to come (probably as part of my daily playlist while working), so this having that one feels like the greatest benefit of having played it for me personally.

So yes. I like the music!!

In Closing...

I was irritated when I first heard about this because it felt like something I loved (Breath of the Wild) was being defiled by being used for some spin-off in a genre I don't like at all, being the delicate little pacifist that I am who'd very much like to make games without any violence at all. A shameless, soulless money-grab, no doubt!

I gave it a go with that in mind - trying something I don't feel positively or excited about - and at first that did get in the way. But the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it, and I really came to enjoy spending a few hours a day just hacking away at enemies in these objectively repetitive missions. It was mindless, but that was a nice relief from all the usual stress and overthinking. I got a better understanding of why people would enjoy this sort of thing.

I probably learned a few things about what I do or don't want to do in my own games too!

I'm not sure what to play next though; I'll need to look through my list and decide on something... (So much for 'Indie Game of the Week' though! That lasted literally one week.)