What are you playing 4: HD Remaster Gold Collector's Edition Thread of the Year

[Razade]

Finished Hyrule Warrior: Age of Calamity. I love Dynasty Warrior style games. Mindlessly hacking at things with a podcast is a great time sink and the more enemies on screen the better. Nighty Nine Nights this is not, in terms of enemies on screen, but that's ok because that game (as old as it is) had a ton of flaws. I never played the original Hyrule Warriors though I'll be picking it (and the latest Pirate Warriors game) up soon.

Age of Calamity however was a mixed bag.

The Good

Level variety and tasks weren't nearly as frustarating as a lot of older Dynasty Warrior style games. Time limits were generous for missions, and mostly generous for side missions. I never felt I couldn't explore the whole map but rarely did since I knew I'd go back to grind.

Graphics. The game ran smooth and while I saw some complaints about slowdown I never saw it. I haven't done co-op however and that's apparently where a lot of the slowdown occurs.

Story was solid as well. For a "what if we won" scenario....it was cute. I'd much rather have had that as a side mission among many like most Dynasty Warrior style games have it but all in all they did a good job with a single story with a single narrative and it felt like a true Zelda game in that regard. There's a few moments of genuine warmth and sadness if you're a fan of the characters and while there's not a lot of time spent fleshing out the characters beyond their archetypes, there's some which was a surprise. The trade off for doing a single narrative rather than a ton of scenarios allowed for it and I'm generally happy with what they did.

The Bad

The characters you unlock are just not very fun. Dynasty Warrior games are all about having oodles of characters with tons of different styles and animations for you to try out until you find the one you love and they give you Link at the very start. Link has three different styles of combat. Sword and Shield, Spear and Two handed Weapon and all three are super fun. You have to use Link for the story missions so you're going to be using him the most. The Goron are slow and generally just kind of not fun during timed events of which they take part in a lot so the whole "generous with the time" becomes "too slow to deal with time". Overall the majority of people you unlock just don't have as fun of playstyles, being hyper focused into their niche, as the people you start out with. Impa and Link are a joy, Zelda's great when you unlock her magic. The King and maybe the Gerudo are fun but The Great Fairy optional you can unlock is massive and takes damage like crazy and just is kinda not fun, the Goron are too slow and don't have great specials and the Zora are....just kinda ok. Link is by far the strongest, he'll be the highest level and just has the most versatile playstyle.

The Grind. God is it frustrating. It's not even fun in a classic Dynasty Warrior way.

Special enemies like Hinox and the like go down slow and while the combat is very BotW feeling it gets repetitive fast even for a game about doing the same thing over and over and over. Not to mention as the difficulty increases the windows to get their weakened state gets harder to pull off which is just not very enjoyable. A lot of the times I'd take hits not because I earned it but because

The camera and the resulting jumping and flinging yourself into a glide was off the charts because of how button prompts work and man was that annoying.

The Ugly

Guardians. Just like in BotW these things are super annoying when you first encounter them and you never get Ancient Arrows or anything similar to make them less so. Their beam attack is insanely difficult to dodge and by the end of the game you're fighting two or three at a time. In one side mission you're fighting five or six at a time and there's just never a time there isn't a laser homing in on you. They have an AoE splash effect so even when you dodge you're going to take a little damage. Healing items are honestly really rare and if you're using Link you want full health always so it's just a little bit of a bummer.

I beat the main game, no grinding, in about 15 hours. I might have been faster than most because I've played a lot of these games and am generally pretty good at them. I've seen an average time of about 20 hours, which I find hard to believe. The rest is just going to be grinding, and that's fine, it's to be expected of this kind of game, but for a game purported to have 60 hours of gameplay, 45 hours of grinding is not a-ok to me.

I still really enjoyed my time with the game. I'm looking forward to unlocking the last two characters and finishing it. I might even go back and actually finish BotW after. Just have the DLC and the last fight to go.