Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity Review
This past week brought a complicated holiday with it. Thanksgiving is a weird thing to celebrate when you think about it, but the continued outbreak of COVID-19, and those who refuse to take it seriously, only heightened tensions. Frustratingly, not even the holiday and advisement to stay home could put a stop to America’s continued racial violence. Killings by both officials and civilians marred this week, emphasizing the continued need for groups like Black Lives Matter. As we enter the Christmas season, I hope everyone will remember those who need some extra help. But, for the last time in 2020, let’s make an awkward transition to talking about video games.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity serves as both a prequel and a sequel to 2017’s Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild thanks to time travel shenanigans. In the opening video of Breath of the Wild, the monster known as Calamity Ganon emerges and plunges the land of Hyrule into chaos. Princess Zelda traps both herself and Ganon inside Hyrule Castle to limit the damage and the warrior Link is put into a 100-year sleep to recover from the battle. Age of Calamity introduces a twist: as Ganon begins his assault on Hyrule, a small robot awakens and sends itself back in time to warn Zelda and her friends of the coming destruction. Armed with knowledge from the future, Zelda, Link, and the other champions of Hyrule must fight to protect themselves from their own doomed future.
In addition to being part of the sprawling Legend of Zelda franchise, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is also the latest in the Warriors franchise produced by developer Omega Force. The Warriors games are famous for pitting players against nearly countless waves of enemy soldiers and, for better or worse, Age of Calamity follows in those footsteps faithfully. The vast majority of levels will involve the player cutting through swaths of classic Legend of Zelda enemies in order to reach a specific point on the map and/or defeat a specific enemy. Even though this game design isn’t exactly engaging, it does scratch the itch I have to do something with my hands while listening to a podcast or the like. Unfortunately, Age of Calamity’s setting takes away a major strength the other Warriors games have and that’s the setting. Almost all of the Warriors games take place in a fantasy version of 3rd century China during the Three Kingdoms era. This backdrop allows players to be and fight against named characters, each with their own motivations and personalities, which spices up the otherwise monotonous gameplay. When I would find a special enemy in those games, I would know I’m fighting against Cao Ren, cousin to emperor Cao Cao and general of the Wei kingdom. On the other hand, Age of Calamity has only a handful of named enemies, more then half of whom have no lines or personalities beyond angry screaming, and even those rarely show up. I could never bring myself to care about beating the umpteenth Moblin or Lynel because they were just another generic monster. This is especially bad because the encounters with more powerful enemies are the only moments of actual interest in the gameplay. The hundreds of enemy grunts pose no actual challenge to even the most inexperienced players and technically don’t even have to be killed, so having the generals be equally dull makes for a disappointing time.
The only shining light in the bland fog of Age of Calamity is the playable characters. As the game opens, players can choose to take control of Link, Zelda, or Impa, a character who isn't new to the Zelda franchise but has been remade into a ninja-wizard for this game. Within the first few hours, players will also unlock the Four Divine Champions as seen in Breath of the Wild. With the exception of Link, who is the epitome of average hack-and-slash character, each character has a creatively designed play style that clearly reflects their personalities. One of my personal favorites was Zelda herself. In the story, Zelda is frustrated by her inability to access her ancestral magical abilities, so she throws herself into researching the long-lost technology of the Sheikah people. On the battlefield, this is shown by Zelda wielding the ancient Sheikah Slate, an ancient piece of technology similar to a tablet with incredible abilities such as freezing enemies in time and summoning explosives. As Zelda fights, she rapidly invokes these abilities, making for a flashy and outlandish fighting style. Her prowess with Sheikah Slate also allows her to use her standard attacks to exploit enemy weaknesses that the other characters are forced to rely on special moves to take advantage of. Another example, though one I personally enjoyed much less, is Revali, an unparalleled archer from the bird-like Rito people. Unlike most of the other characters, Revali uses a bow and arrow instead of a melee weapon and fights using a wide variety of specialty arrows, including exploding arrows and electrified arrows. The versatile contents of his quiver allows players to use the right moves for different situations while still keeping their distance from the enemy. On top of this, Revali’s ability to fly and unbearable ignorance causes him to see himself above others, both literally and figuratively. Revali is the only character who can take to the skies, which allows him to access an entirely different set of attacks than what he can use on the ground. Thanks to his aerial combat abilities, Revali can fly over the battlefield, raining down attacks across wide areas of the map with ease. The real shame is that, save for a few encounters with tough generals, there is no reason to use the full extent of a character’s abilities. It’s like owning a high end sports car in New York City, yes it’s capable of impressive feats but you’ll almost never get to see them. Swarms of identical foes do little to push players to heights of greater performance, so it was up to me to try out new moves instead of mindlessly bashing out the same three-hit combo over and over again.
The gameplay in Age of Calamity being largely boring is a huge problem because the game has very little else to offer, especially in terms of the story. The initial premise interested me greatly, I love the idea of characters being forewarned of an approaching disaster and trying to find ways to avert it. Sadly, the story is hampered by the gameplay in more than one way. The first issue is that the story is mostly told outside the levels which can take anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. Worse, not every level players clear will advance the plot thanks to side missions that are often necessary to complete if players want their characters to be properly leveled up. It is extremely difficult to stay invested in even the best story when it’s drip fed to you with these huge gaps between updates and those very gaps keep Age of Calamity’s story from being even a little complex. At this point, I have played the game for about 25 hours and I am able to relate the plot in just over one minute. That is a bad ratio, no question. However, I don’t blame the writers because they had to keep the story simple enough to follow after players had just slogged through 90 minutes of uninspired monster massacre. Secondly, when the game does try to tell a story during the course of a level, it is easy to miss because it’s confined to un-voiced conversations between characters contained in tiny dialogue bubbles in the bottom corner of the screen. Players are able to pause the game and navigate to a menu that has all of the recent conversation, but when I am carving the most expedient path through my fifth horde of off-brand goblins, I don’t want to watch two places on the screen at once, nor do I want to take even more time to pause and read what’s happening. I can’t imagine huge companies like Nintendo and Omega Force didn’t have the budget to get these lines read by the voice actors, so there’s no excuse to make this part of the story so obscured.
I’m disappointed Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity turned out the way it did, not only because I’m a fan of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild but also because I want Nintendo to be more open to using their franchises in new ways. Hopefully, this game will sell well and that, combined with the popularity of Cadence of Hyrule, will ease Nintendo’s iron grip so we can see more crossovers in the future. As for the present, though I understand that the Zelda franchise is a big deal and Nintendo thinks $60 is a reasonable price, there’s nothing to support that. If you really want a simplistic game to occupy your hands while you consume some other media, I recommend one of the Dynasty Warriors games from the same developer. They’re several years old at this point so you’ll get a great deal. If you want another hit of Zelda, go finish Breath of the Wild, since there’s a pretty good chance you never got around to that. Either way, wait until you can get Age of Calamity for at least 50% off.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
