Rating of
3/5
Eww, There’s ‘Musou’ in This ‘Zelda.’
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 02/27/15
I have never played a ‘Warriors’ (‘Musou’ in Japanese) game before, neither ‘Dynasty,’ nor ‘Samurai,’ nor ‘Gundam,’ nor any variety of cross-licensed flavor mix-in. The series simply isn’t discussed widely in the RPG-loving circles I tend to frequent, and thus never entered my sphere of awareness, outside of the huge numbers of used ‘Dynasty Warriors’ games that lined the shelves of my local used game stores. However, with the WiiU struggling to establish a library and grasping at any means to justify its existence, I figured I’d throw Nintendo and Tecmo-Koei a couple of bones and try out the ‘Warriors’ style of gameplay with a candy shell of ‘Zelda’ goodness.
The game that resulted from this union of two companies, “Hyrule Warriors,” purposefully takes Tecmo-Koei’s ‘Warriors’ engine and only adds a veneer of ‘Zelda’-ness thanks to a dictate issued by ‘Zelda’ creator and legendary Nintendo developer, Shigeru Miyamoto. Even though Tecmo-Koei reportedly wanted to create a legitimate ‘Zelda’ game with some ‘Warriors’-style inspiration, Miyamoto forbade it (probably fearing that a second-party might create a better ‘Zelda’ game than he has lately). Unfortunately, in keeping the ‘Zelda’ elements of the game thin, the entire experience suffers.
Presentation
“Hyrule Warriors” looks pretty good as a modern HD game that includes updated and reimagined character models of the most famous characters from Nintendo’s recent 3D ‘Zelda’ games. The environments where each battle takes place are large, and the game manages to spit out huge mobs of enemies without suffering any noticeable framerate issues.
However, I played the vast majority of “Hyrule Warriors” in 2-player co-op mode, which forces one player to use the GamePad screen while the other player uses the TV. There is a huge and significant drop in visual quality when playing co-op, as the WiiU struggles to output two different video streams to two different screens with different resolutions. Having jumped directly into co-op before playing any single-player missions, I was surprised at how bad the game looked on the TV (I forced my colleague, Chris, to use the small and crappy GamePad screen): Everything was blurry and there were jaggies all over the place… it looked like a PlayStation 2 game from the turn of the millennium! Fortunately, these graphical quality issues disappear completely in single-player and don’t really have a measurable impact on the game in co-op, other than looking cheap.
Another interesting visual aspect of “Hyrule Warriors” is the Adventure Mode map, which is a 100% faithful re-creation of the world map from the original “The Legend of Zelda,” complete with 8-bit sprite representations of every playable character (many of whom didn’t even exist in the 8-bit era). While this is a great way to tug at nostalgia, the entire Adventure Mode map feels like a bit of an afterthought instead of a core part of the game.
The audio in “Hyrule Warriors” is essentially the same as the graphics: There are a lot of re-used and re-imagined audio assets from recent 3D ‘Zelda’ games, from iconic themes to the jingle that plays upon opening a treasure chest. Unfortunately, in keeping with ‘Zelda’ tradition, characters aren’t fully voiced, but instead grunt at each other while text boxes containing their dialog scroll across the screen. This lack of full voiceacting is a bit of a liability in a game where a lot of action is happening on-screen at all times and when characters are trying to communicate important objectives or changing mission goals to the player. It’s difficult to focus on reading their text boxes while simultaneously fighting off half a dozen mini-boss-grade enemies and dozens of minions.
The only segments of the game that are fully voices are the between-mission narrations that occur over the top of loading screens. These segments didn’t really need to be voiced, and the actress that was chosen for the narrator role sounds both like she has a Swedish accent and like she is reading a storybook to a group of slow children.
Technically, “Hyrule Warriors” is okay, but not great. Aside from the graphics quality issue in co-op mode, I had the game outright crash on me a couple of times. In addition, the load times between selecting a mission and actually getting to play it are unacceptably long. It felt like I was back in the PlayStation 1 era waiting for things to load! “Hyrule Warriors” also features a disturbing amount of DLC, which I didn’t purchase.
Story
With Miyamoto maintaining such a deathgrip on the ‘Zelda’ gameplay elements that could have make “Hyrule Warriors” great, it’s no surprise that the story elements were locked-down as well. Instead of a new canonical entry in the already-convoluted ‘Zelda’ Timeline, “Hyrule Warrior” feels like a really ridiculous fanfiction that haphazardly mashes-up as many ‘Zelda’ characters as possible while simultaneously introducing a handful of new very Mary-Sue-ish characters to serve as new villains with one super-annoying new ally for the Good Guys.
“Hyrule Warriors’” story begins like any other ‘Zelda’ game, with hordes of monsters threatening Hyrule’s peace and Princess Zelda looking for the current generation’s Chosen Hero (a.k.a., Link) to defend the realm. The unique twist this time around is that the monsters are being controlled by a villainous (and rather buxom) woman named Cia whose reason for attacking Hyrule is that she is Link’s biggest and most obsessive fangirl.
Along with Cia come two new evil generals: a Dragon Knights in red armor named Volga and a weird fusion of a Poe and a Wizrobe named… Wizro. Cia’s powers of prophecy and time travel allow her to send her generals into the many disparate eras of the ‘Zelda’ Timeline to wreak havoc in their attempts to conquer Link and win him over to the dark side.
In opening these portals, however, Cia and her team inadvertently bolster the Good Guys’ ranks with supporting characters from those same time periods, ranging from Darunia the Goron Chieftain to Agatha the annoying bug-girl from “Twilight Princess.” Cia’s dark inspirations are also challenged by Lana, an annoyingly perky, super-kawaii, blue-haired girl who seems to have some connection to the villains. Of course, being a ‘Zelda’ game, Gannondorf makes an appearance and even becomes playable for a while, as the player must help him take back the position of Top Badass that was usurped by Cia.
Ultimately, the story in “Hyrule Warriors” is serviceable but not really very impressive. Some of the plot twists are nonsensical, while the entire story feels like a throw-away experience because, in the grand scheme of things, none of the events and characters in it will ever be referenced by any future ‘Zelda’ games. If Lana ever shows up in an official first-party ‘Zelda’ title, I will be shocked (and annoyed).
Gameplay
“Hyrule Warriors” is a ‘Warriors’ game. End of sentence. Having never played a ‘Warriors’ game before, I wasn’t sure what to expect, aside from big hectic battles with a lot of enemies on-screen at once. That’s pretty much what I got.
“Hyrule Warriors” is primarily divided into two main game modes. Legend Mode is the story mode, and completing one mission unlocks the next (along with a new playable character in many cases). Adventure Mode seems to have been added as an afterthought to give players something to do after completing Legend Mode in the form of grinding and hunting for unlockables. Four of the playable characters can only be unlocked by playing partway through Adventure Mode, along with a large number of other characters’ secondary, tertiary, and quaternary weapons. Each square on the Adventure Mode map offers a specific challenge, often for a specific character, with specific (and frequently unlisted) minimum performance metrics required to unlock everything in that map square.
At the core of both main modes, however, is a large-scale Beat ‘em Up with ill-advised RPG elements. Each playable warrior has a character level that affects how much damage they do in battle on top of the damage stat of their equipped weapon. This character level reportedly caps out at 200, but I never even got close, as I got Link to level 41 before getting bored with the whole thing. It is possible to spend rupees to level-up characters that are lower than the highest-level character on the roster, but that just essentially exchanges grinding experience to grinding money. Each character can equip one of several weapon types, and each weapon type can randomly drop after missions with a range of attack values and between zero and four special ability slots. It’s possible to use the game’s blacksmith to merge special abilities from one weapon onto another weapon of the same type, but the random nature of these drops is incredibly frustrating to deal with. Some weapons drop with sealed special abilities that only unlock after killing a certain number of enemies with that exact weapon.
Aside from grinding for levels and grinding for random drops, “Hyrule Warriors” features grinding for bits of enemy debris to use in Badge crafting. Each character has an identical Badge Tree that allows players to unlock basic attack and defense functionality, along with a variety of small passive bonuses, by exchanging specific combinations of junk for specific Badges. While every Badge Tree is identical, each character requires different materials to craft the same Badges. None of the materials can be purchased with rupees, but must be found via grinding stages with a large number of the type of enemy that drops the material in question.
The actual Beat ‘em Up gameplay in “Hyrule Warriors” is functional, but extremely repetitive and gets old fast. Attacks revolve around combos between regular and strong attacks, which also build up a special attack meter that can be used to unleash a string of blows that grant temporary invincibility. The ‘Zelda’ magic meter can be filled by finding magic pots and emptied in one fell swoop to unleash another type of temporary-invincibility-granting attack. Throughout the course of Legend Mode, the player will also unlock a variety of iconic ‘Zelda’ secondary weapons, like bombs and boomerangs, which get added automatically to every character’s inventory.
Each mission involves the player(s) running around a huge battlefield environment filled with minion-type enemies (which are really weak and die in one or two hits). Groups of minions are commonly led by mini-bosses, which frequently expose their weakpoints via a meter that can be chipped away in order to unleash a free series of powerful blows. Giant boss monsters occasionally appear as well, which require exploitation of the weakpoint meter since they are invincible at all other times.
Over the course of a given mission, the player might be tasked with capturing a keep, eliminating a specific mini-boss or giant boss, or some similar task. Capturing a keep is a simple process of killing enough minions within it to make the keep mini-boss appear, then killing it. Capturing an enemy keep or outpost automatically causes that keep/outpost to start producing allied minions.
The mission-based gameplay comes so close to being strategic, yet remains impossibly far away from that noble goal. It is impossible to tell AI allies what to do during a mission, and all of them are woefully incompetent, no matter how leveled-up that character might be. Instead, the player is forced to run from one side of the battlefield to the other, putting out every fire by themselves. Because of the incompetence of NPCs and the size of battlefields, “Hyrule Warriors” is much, MUCH less fun as a single-player game. With a co-op human partner, missions become more manageable, as one player can focus on completing the main mission while the other player can deal with all of the whining NPCs and side-tasks.
Ultimately, though, “Hyrule Warriors” is just too repetitive and grindy for its own good. Had the snazzy Adventure Mode map been incorporated with Legend Mode, I think the resulting product could have been better and more engaging. As it is, keeping so much content locked away in Adventure Mode and tiered by arbitrary level requirements for success (and an even more arbitrary grading system based on number of kills, time, and damage taken) makes the vast majority of the game feel like an afterthought. Why are all of these optional weapons and bonus characters locked away in a mode that is only really playable after completing the story? Adventure Mode might make the game longer (as there is a LOT to do), but only as a story-free coda tacked onto the end.
Overall
“Hyrule Warriors” is a poor excuse for a ‘Zelda’ game, but it was never intended to be anything other than a ‘Warriors’ game. That said, I can see how someone who loves ‘Zelda’ and REALLY loves grinding could get a lot of ‘entertainment’ time out of it, since it takes an incredible number of hours to unlock everything and grind every character to max level. I didn’t even come close to unlocking everything, but the repetitive nature of the gameplay and the fact that any failed mission is a complete waste of time left me feeling bored rather quickly. Anyone who is desperate for some ‘Zelda’ on the WiiU would probably be better served by waiting for the next official entry in the franchise.
Presentation: 4/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
