Spoiler Post: Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

 Before we go any further, I want to preface this article that there will be spoilers for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.  If you have not played the game and you are planning on it or if you are currently playing it and have not reached the end-game and/or not yet unlocked all of the playable characters and still want to be surprised, I would highly recommend not reading any further.  I also want to say that this article is going to be all over the place and will likely come across as some incoherent combination of rant and thoughtful commentary.  Just bear with me if you want and we will meet up again at the end.

The main purpose of this article is to act as an overflow for a lot of what I either did not say in the primary Game EXP article for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.  And while some of what I wanted to bring up/mention/discuss would be spoilers, there are some things that you will probably say something like, "We knew about that from the rumors back in 2019, this isn't a spoiler douche-canoe!"  And to that, I will just ignore it because this is the Internet and I can do that.

The use of time travel as a mechanic for why Age of Calamity exists, as I previously said, I am more or less okay with; leaning heavily towards the more side.  I understand the appeal of the mechanic, allowing the writers of a story to ask "What if things happened a little differently?"  Or in this case, "How can we tell the story about how the Calamity came to pass without Ganon actually winning?" There is the inevitable question though of "If you could go back in time, why did you only stop Tradgety X and not Tradgeties X, Y, Z, β, and щ while you were at it!?"  And my only answer to that question is because that is not the story being told?  You could explain it away that when Terrako made the jump back in time that they only had a split second to decide how far back in time to jump.  "But then why didn't they jump further back in time after they knew they were safe!?"  I hear you shout at your computer/phone screen between sips of [insert your least favorite beverage here] and slobbering bites of [ insert food that other people eat that offends you to your core here].  Maybe it was a use it once ability?  "But then how did they use it again, later on, to pull Yonobu, Sidon, Riju, and Teba into the past to prevent the Champions from being imprisoned in their Divine Beasts!?  And while we're at it, why wasn't..." I'm going to cut you off there because unlike you, I have not dedicated the last four years to these questions so I am going to move on.

And speaking of characters being pulled into the past to help Zelda and Co. with their fight against the Calamity, yeah, okay, I guess that works too narratively.  For me though, at this point in the game, maybe just over halfway through, I felt I was just getting comfortable with the playable characters and now I have four more to navigate.  I guess it makes sense for this type of game where part of the point is bringing together characters who would not have interacted being able to fight together, I get that because it would have been an out of ordinary spin-off if you could only play as Link; which would essentially just be another Legend of Zelda game.  I think the turn-off for me, along with feeling like I already had a good feel for the nine or 10 playable characters at that time, and now I have 13 or 14 to manage.  Weapons to upgrade, and levels to keep track of which could turn any enjoyable 10-minute stage into a 27-minute slog as you die or fail to meet the time objective, again and again, ultimately forcing you to quit when you realize the weapon you have equipped was never upgraded.  This might have happened a time or two with a couple of the characters.

One of the clues that Age of Calamity was not going to be the prequel that I thought it was, and that characters were not going to be consistent with how they were in Breath of the Wild (after the heroes from the future appeared to help out their respective Champions) was when Calamity Ganon's Prophet of Doom Astor, betrayed the Yiga Clan and Master Khoga ended up becoming a playable character.  This plot twist of sorts did make sense in this timeline because, in this timeline, the Blights were driven back from their attacks on the Devine Beasts, so Astor needed a new influx of souls to bring the Blights back and the near limitless members of the Yiga Clan does seem like an excellent source for that purpose.  That being said, I was not really enticed to play as Khoga for several reasons.  First was that his starting weapons were at level 1, so despite him being at a comparable level to the other characters I had spent the last 50+ hours playing with, his attacks did not feel as powerful.  Plus there was a whole new move set to learn and become accustomed to and a brand new power gauge mechanic and specific for him, a stamina gauge to keep track of, that outside of missions where you were required to use Khoga, I mainly left him alone.

I do wish that there had been another way to upgrade your weapons apart from paying gold to have them forged/mashed together.  There were some other services where you could use monster parts and other loot components along with rupees, but weapon forging only took rupees.  And speaking of rupees, I never seemed to have enough, maybe maxing out at 15,000 at one point before blowing it all on weapon upgrades, rare food ingredients, and a mission or two that required you to fork over 5,000 rupees (stupid Great Faerie missions).  I guess part of me did appreciate that this wasn't a game whereby the halfway point you were just collecting money for the rest of the game because you already bought everything, but there were several times that I just ground levels for 30-40 minutes because I needed gold for any of the reasons mentioned above.  Mostly though it was to upgrade weapons

Although I should not blame my inability to keep track of what weapons I had equipped or what level they were as I know that I did not either fully understand or do a good job with the whole weapon seals (which was a part of the weapon forging process) thing until near the end of the game.  Weapon Seals are abilities that you can give your weapons when you take them to the blacksmith, but you are limited to three abilities, with passive skills like "Perfect Dodge Timing Window," "Special Attack Charge Rate" and "Reduced Ice Damage," you could customize and augment how you approach what Ganon's forces throw at you.  Me, I just jammed weapons I did not care about into the forging/leveling-up without looking at what was doing what.  Maybe there was a tutorial that I blazed through but there were times when I did not feel like I knew what I was doing and that the game did not do a good job explaining the whole process.  Again, this is probably on me.  I think the only time I ever switched weapons was if I found what I thought was a better base weapon than the one a character currently had equipped.  For Link, there were a couple of missions that had a requirement where he could only use a two-handed weapon and then I would switch to and Ancient Battle Axe++ (which came with the ++ designation, I did nothing to upgrade it to that).  For Zelda, sure, that Shiekah Slate has an extra part on it, that must mean it's more powerful.  That was literally my thought process.

Speaking of Zelda, I loved that you could FINALLY control her in combat (although I guess you could already do that in Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition) but I wish her move-set was a little more user-friendly.  Her attacks felt kind of slow and not very powerful compared to Daruk and but I frequently felt like I could not get the timing quite down for her to feel effective.  Her powers and move set did change in maybe the last third of the game after she unlocked her power and instead of using the Sheikah Slate.  I did prefer this form of Zelda as I felt her attacks were a little more straightforward, but there were times when she still felt grossly underpowered compared to the other characters at the same time in the game.  There was a late-stage mission after she awakens her power where you have to kill 1,000 enemies and I must have attempted that stage five times, replaying after failing to reach the 1k kills by the time the timer ran out, before giving up to grind levels to get rupees to upgrade her Sealing Bow of Light because it sounded more powerful than the Sacred Bow that she starts off with after unlocking her power.  

The only other thing that kind of annoyed me about Zelda, and I recognize that this is a fairly petty thing, was her catchphrase of sorts.  Each character has a powerful attack that you can use any time after filling a gauge and when you use it, each character has a different catchphrase that they say as they perform their attacks; although Link just does his grunt/scream.  After Zelda unlocks her power, her power attack is that she can draw from her power gauge and just unleash a strong attack (being more powerful than her other two default attacks), and each time you attack while drawing power from your power gauge, she says her phrase: "I must protect Hyrule, every way I can." (It could also be "anyway I can" but I can hear it either way, depending on what I want to hear).  By that point in the game when she gains this ability, her phrase had already gotten pretty stale, and having her say it five times in the span of fewer than 30 seconds did not help matters.  See, I can be petty too.

The last thing, at least for now, I can think of to talk about one of the characters I just did not care for, for one reason or another.  At 93 hours and after unlocking Calamity Ganon as a playable character, I felt that I had had all the enjoyment I was going to get out of AoC.  I had finished the main campaign.  I had finished all of the post-game missions to reassemble Terrako (which I honestly thought felt cheap just to get another playable character, but like the rest of the game, I was proved wrong and Omega Force again wrote a great sequence justifying this narrative choice) and after playing a couple of the missions where you engaged Astor in a few battles that felt like they should have been used earlier in the game I unlocked Calamity Ganon.  I did play a couple of missions as Ganon and I guess it was fun to use his moveset and take out a semi-large amount of enemies, but this just felt like a level from a game about playing different characters from a franchise, not playing a story.  And again, this was not the reason Age of Calamity interested me in the first place.  

So while I have not fully finished all of Calamity Ganon's missions and unlocked all that there is to unlock I feel like I am done for the time being.  There is the DLC which gives you some new playable characters (see above about feeling overwhelmed with character choice and how they relate to the story at large), new weapons for Link (see above about the Master Sword), the Divine Beast motorcycle for Zelda (maybe when she is sprinting or is it an actual weapon?), and some additional stages and features.  Maybe it is just me, but I feel like this DLC came out too late for me to be interested in it.  Maybe if it was released within the first two or three months after the game was out, but the game was released in November 2020 and the DLC came out in May 2021.  I guess I was still playing the game at that time, but I was already set in my ways with the characters I liked and see the first part of this paragraph again.

That is is folks.  That is all I have got for now.  More than I was planning on putting out there, and I am 98.47% sure that I will come up with something else I could have added when I reread this article in a few weeks, but I may just relegate that to a Twitter thread rather than a full article.  So thank you for joining me on the one-sided semi-coherent journey back through Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and maybe we will visit again sometime after Breath of the Wild 2 is released.  Or after I start and finish playing any of the other Legend of Zelda games that I have yet to play.  Or if I decide to do a chronology playthrough, being when I pick up Spirit Tracks again and just finish that playthrough to call it good because I am not starting that drudgery all over again.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

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