Hyrule Warriors first thoughts review

I grabbed myself a copy this morning and, although I didn't get much play time, I still got a few hours in. Before that, though, I'd like to apologize for my long absence. I was sick and away from home for a week, so everything, including drawing, has been put on hold. Anyway, let's talk about the game. Now, this will be brief, as I haven't done too much with the game yet, and I don't really know much about Dynasty Warriors games as a whole. In Legend mode I have unlocked Impa, Sheik, Lana, and Darunia. I'll be playing Lake Hylia where I will doubtlessly be unlocking Ruto tomorrow, and I'm also really looking forward to unlocking Fi and the others. I played a little bit of Adventure Mode and Free Mode, and have made a few visits to the Bazaar, so there will be a decent amount to talk about for only a few hours of play.

I guess I'll start with Legend mode, since that's the primary game mode and the one I've played the most of. The Wii U Game Pad controls are tight - very comfortable, but the nunchuck controls are a disaster. The button choices are weirdly placed, and many abilities involve the D-Pad, which is super unresponsive. I think the dash/doge maneuver being where the L-Targeting button is normally placed is a good sign of how bad the controls are with the nun-chuck. They should have taken example from Mario Kart and made all the buttons generally lie-up to the equivalent area on both control schemes. You're also forced to swing the Wiimote to attack in this mode, which is something I got sick of five years ago, and it makes using the strong attack buttons in combos feel very awkward. At the end of the day - make sure you are the one with the Game Pad or a classic pro controller when playing this one. Anyway, getting back to the topic, Legend mode is like "story mode" in which you play through scenarios to uncover more cut scenes to learn more of the story and unlock everything for the other modes. From what I can see, many speculators were right; the game is mostly just button mashing. At least it continually adds missions for you to take care of, though. The difficulty is rather low. I am playing the game on medium, and button mashing solves almost every problem. I can't imagine what easy mode is like. Most enemies barely attack you (some not at all) and many tougher enemies are still easily taken down by button mashing and nothing more. Offense is clearly more important in this game than defense. However, the killing thousands of enemies bit does seem pretty awesome considering the atmosphere. The game is like being in the middle of a war, and both teams have thousands of warriors, as well as captains. The actual character captains seem FAR stronger than anybody else, though, as I've yet to see a CPU Link (or any CPU controlled playable character) fall in battle. But, as I was saying, being elite commanders among many scrubs isn't such a bad setup, as it makes for a great distraction and delay when you are being asked by other captains to rush to certain areas of the stage and take care of certain missions. The idea of claiming all the bases is very fun, and the missions keep the battle intense. The game almost seems like a free roaming hack and slash crossed with a war strategy game due to it's base conquering. Sadly, though, there is little player involvement beyond killing enemies by mashing buttons, killing a tougher enemy be mashing buttons, or conquering temples by killing enemies with mashing buttons. For example, the Death Mountain stage has constant rocks rolling at your main base (which if destroyed ends your whole game) and you are asked to stop the rocks, but rather than do something a bit more unique or involved to stop them, all you do is conquer the bases they are coming from. Everything, regardless of the mission, comes down to just mashing buttons on hoards of enemies.

The game is fun, but sadly it feels more fun in memory after playing than when actually playing. The battle scenes are intense and exciting, but the redundant playing style is not very good at keeping it interesting while playing. I really, really hope there is a vs mode in Free Mode where two friends can battle with their own armies to conquer all bases on a stage, but I haven't seen any signs of that. Choosing a playable character and another CPU ally captain or two and entering a war between your army and your friend's sounds super fun to me, and such a mode would create a lot of replay value for me, but as I said, I have and seen nothing of the sort so far. Anyway, I will be playing more tomorrow, and hopefully unlocking the rest of the characters. When given the choice between Ocarina stages, Twilight stages, and Skyward stages, I obviously dove on Ocarina first, as I've been dying to play as the sages for years, especially Darunia. I just got him, so I haven't used him yet, but I intend to first thing tomorrow. So far I have used the most of Impa and Sheik. Impa's a beast, and I love Sheik's combos. I haven't played as Lana yet. I don't really have any interest in her to be honest.

I played very little of Adventure Mode, but what I saw I liked. It's like your average challenges mode, only in this game, since the whole game is missions, it seems much more like an actual game mode than many other games' challenge modes, which is just entering levels you've beat and doing something weird in them. This Adventure Mode looks like a massive 1P mode full of unique exploration, great rewards, challenge and mystery. Many heart containers and other character exclusive power-ups are unlocked specifically in this mode. The plethora of 80s NES Zelda graphics in this section naturally put a huge, dopey, nostalgic grin on my face, too. I'm a sucker for 8-bit memories. As I said, I haven't played too much more of this area yet, so I haven't much more to say about it. Seems cool.

Free Mode is where two players can just freely play whatever missions they want for fun, as whatever characters they want. I hear this is the mode where you can eventually play as the villains. As I said earlier, I really hope there is a versus mode. I really hate that you still have to manually skip the cut scenes in this mode. They shouldn't even be present. If you want to see the cut scenes, go to Legend Mode. Free mode should feel free, not slowed down and restricted. I kind of wish there was a really free mode too, where there were no missions, just unlimited time to run around the maps and fight monsters, possibly ending when all temples are claimed by you. This "Free Mode" seems a bit unnecessary, more like Legend Mode with whatever character you want.

In Legend Mode you can also visit the Bazaar, appropriately playing the Skyward Sword Bazaar theme. Here you can purchase badges for characters to up stats, as well as level them up for money at the Training Room, which comes in handy a lot with keeping your army at the same levels. There's some other stuff, including a very complicated weapons upgrade system, that I haven't really looked into much. I will say that, this game has a tendency to present things as more complicated than they really are. The game is super simplistic, yet it constantly overwhelms the player by mentioning loads of specifics early on and using poor choice of words. The game can generally be learned while playing and through exploration and experimenting in menus. So far so good. There's also a gallery for unlocked goods. You can view each character's stats with very nice resolution renders of them in the Legend Mode menu to keep you up to date on your warriors and where they stand.

The graphics are pretty damn good. Not amazing, but pretty damn good, and surely good enough. Some of the textures can get a bit dark and scratchy some times, but the character movement is beautiful, the colors are beautiful, and the menu screens all look nicely done and quite beautiful (and Cia's tits... beautiful). The music isn't too interesting to me. Games that just take every song from a franchise and turn them all into death metal has always felt out-of-place, half-ass, and unappealing to me, and it really doesn't fit in the Zelda world. The map musics are all well done, but the battle scenes are almost all just fast electric guitar covers of Zelda songs, which seems weird and sounds bland. Epic orchestral battle music would have fit nicer. So, for me, it wins with graphics but fails with audio.

So, all in all, Hyrule Warriors is a pretty fun experience so far. It's not the kind of game I typically play, so it feels fresh and exciting, but it is also redundant and numbing at times. It's a solid "good" for me at the moment. Not amazing, but definitely good. My inner fanboy is going insane over the millions of Zelda references and playable characters though. For any major Zelda fans skeptical of this game, give it a try. It feels 100% like a Zelda game. Not a "Legend of Zelda" game at all, but it feels like it all belongs in that world. There isn't any outside cameo stuff, everything, from characters, locations, music, attacks, enemies, bosses, badges, menus, loading screens, stories, items, and everything is Zelda themed. The guys at Tecmo did about a 1,000x better job representing everything Zelda with this game than Nintendo ever did with SSB.

Coming soon: my long delayed final thoughts, full review of (Aban Hawkins and the) 1001 Spikes.