Turning The Tide In Hyrule
[Review] The Nintendo Switch 2's underhyped musou spectacular
In October the season of the Switch 2 arrived.
While there was certainly a lot to offer during that initial launch window like the excellent Mario Kart World, the champion of consumer friendly business practices: Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour and the critically beloved Donkey Kong Bananza it’s safe to say that Nintendo have been pulling their punches and saving much of the console’s early releases for the run up to that lucrative Christmas window; that window is finally here.
There has been a heavy marketing push for Kirby Air Riders and Pokémon Legends Z-A these past few months but it’s the more overlooked games I’ve been really excited for like Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and the topic of today’s review: Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment. The moment this game got announced I knew it would be a day 1 purchase for me.
Koei Tecmo’s Warriors spin-off series of musou games has been chugging away now for 11 years, starting with Hyrule Warriors on the Wii-U which has flourished into its own trilogy; Fire Emblem got the musou treatment too back in 2017 with Fire Emblem Warriors. “But Scanlines… what on Earth is a musou?” You might be asking. Musou is a subgenre of hack ‘n’ slash games pioneered by Koei Tecmo’s Dynasty Warriors and it’s characterised by its huge numbers of enemies on-screen, the power fantasy of cleaving 12 men apart in one slice and its zone-capturing gameplay on large maps. Playing a musou game is a bit like playing Star Wars Battlefront 2 on the PS2, except you’re always Darth Vader and the enemy team has about 3000 troops.
There’s nothing high-brow, pretentious or high concept about musou. The Last Of Us asks the player questions about the nature of intergenerational violence and trauma, in mainline Zelda the player reflects on what it means to be courageous and what it truly is to be a hero, in Warriors? Koei Tecmo asks only if you’re ready for more. I love it.
With that bit of context out of the way, let’s get into the review.
Fears Of The Kingdom
Age Of Imprisonment is a fully-canon, fleshed out story of the Imprisoning War: a conflict fought aeons before the events of Tears Of The Kingdom, just before A Link To The Past on the SNES if you’re into the Zelda timeline.
Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity on the original Switch was ribbed pretty badly, primarily for its crappy performance but also for its plot which rewrote the fall of Hyrule into something of a fan-fiction where (spoilers) the good guys manage to win against Calamity Ganon and Breath Of The Wild is averted, so you do get the sense that Imprisonment is something of an apology to fans but this hard-nosed dedication to the canon does have some consequences which I’ll discuss in more detail later.
In the time I’ve played so far I wouldn’t say that Age of Imprisonment adds anything vital to the plot of the current Hero Of The Wilds era of Zelda but if you really enjoyed TotK’s plot and want to see how those flashbacks fit into the wider scope of the war then it’s quite satisfying. I was surprised to see them cover the build up to the conflict in detail as well, you aren’t just dumped into fighting the big bad, for the first couple of hours you see the rising suspicion and worsening unity of the kingdom before Ganondorf starts to do what he does best.
Unfortunately, one of my biggest problems with modern Zelda: the anime-style voice acting and writing rear their ugly heads here once again. Every 4th line is a grunt, gasp or moan, some characters speak in full capitals, Zelda is pigeonholed into the enthusiastic dork-girl anime stereotype, instead of any kind of subtlety everyone has to speak their deepest, truest desires in the most unambiguous and unnatural way possible. I hate it.
To finish this section on a positive note, I love how much flavour text there is under each little side objective and challenge on the map.
2/3 Of the map icons in Age Of Imprisonment amount to ‘put in 5 fish and 10 acorns and Zelda unlocks the testicular torsion combo’ but all of the little descriptions and reasons given turn these mini quests and transactions into valuable steps on the road to rebuilding Hyrule’s army and readying the cast of heroes for harder battles ahead.
Cheers Of The Kingdom
Age Of Imprisonment isn’t the Switch 2’s most impressive technical achievement of the year but it just might be the best-looking.
Enemies and allies fill the screen while attacks are enunciated with streaks of blue, flashes of gold and bursts of light, colours are just as vibrant as the mainline Zelda adventures with the foliage and other features looking even more dense, at least to my eye; Age Of Imprisonment looks only slightly better than the Switch 2 version of Tears Of The Kingdom but it does so while processing a burden that would have made the original console melt in your hands.
Age Of Imprisonment’s near-flawless optimisation deserves praise too. I’ve put somewhere in the region of 15 hours into this game so far and while in the docked mode at 1440p I have experienced precisely zero FPS drops during gameplay. In handheld things are slightly less stable and you’ll experience a drop in frames maybe once a mission but I’m talking 10FPS at most and my scrutiny of handheld performance is somewhat more lax. I play docked 95% of the time, if this sounds like a big issue to you then just bear that in mind.
Age of Imprisonment looks its most spectacular when you’re performing Sync Strikes: a mechanic where you can high five another hero standing near you and do a kind of tag team finishing move once you fill up a gauge; the variety of moves between the different character pairings is incredibly fun to explore and these are all beautifully animated and show off some fantastic visual effects.
Disappointingly, cutscenes are locked at 30FPS when the game runs at a perfect 60 and I can’t think of a reason why Koei Tecmo would do this. Listen, I’m not really a framerate or specs obsessive: I put this information in my reviews for your benefit, unless it’s unbearably low or I’m playing a genre that requires a high framerate to play optimally like an FPS I don’t mind going below 60 but to have the game run perfectly at 60 then nerf it during cutscenes? That’s bizarre. Updates are on the way for Age Of Imprisonment so perhaps this frame embargo can be lifted.
I can’t think of a single video game with the ‘The Legend Of Zelda’ name on its box (we don’t mention the CD-I ones) that doesn’t have great music and sound; Age Of Imprisonment isn’t an exception.
Battle For The Wetlands mixes elements of all the best Zora’s Domain themes across the series, adds a bit of tempo and a dash of urgency to great a battle theme that’s very distinctly Zora. For plot reasons I won’t spoil, the hint of melancholy here feels very appropriate.
The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker is my least favourite 3D Zelda… but it’s also a game I grew up with and have nostalgic, fond memories of, even if I don’t love it as an adult, so Battle For The Snowfield’s Dragon Roost Island remix made me smile.
The Unknown Abyss is a weird, glitchy, thoroughly enjoyable beat which incorporates lots of the different audio flourishes from Tears Of The Kingdom’s shrines and The Depths while layering a coating of Twilight Princess paint on top.
Spears Of The Kingdom
I’ve explained how this game feels but not what you actually do. Musou games like Age Of Imprisonment are a fusion of hack ‘n’ slash and zone capturing gameplay with a heavy dose of RPG elements.
Your time in AoI will be spent working through the game’s story missions, side quests, capturing and defending zones and upgrading the roster’s weapons and move sets; you essentially paint a map the good guys’ colour. Continuing the Battlefront analogy, it’s a bit like Galactic Conquest and, being a Paradox player… I get more than a little excited when I do a quest and it flips an enemy region of the map over to Hyrule’s control.
Once again, I’m a massive strategy game fan so I love the sense of momentum and the solidifying of frontlines in Age Of Imprisonment’s campaign. When the prologue ends, things are truly bleak for Hyrule: the cast is split into 2 teams stranded on opposite sides of the kingdom (those 2 dark blue patches on the map are your starting areas) every mission is a desperate scramble to save soldiers who are vastly outnumbered and you struggle through the burning red hellscape of what used to be Hyrule Field.
Over time, as you recapture zones, connect the two halves of the army and sink some upgrades into the cast, allies become more abundant, missions take on a less desperate feel and the forces of Hyrule begin to believe in victory.
And that’s where this game’s persistent dedication to the series canon starts to seriously weigh it down. Each event feels hollow because if you’ve played Tears Of The Kingdom, you know that Ganondorf is imprisoned but that Hyrule is ruined in the process, there’s nothing this story can do to surprise you and Nintendo are never going to allow a third party game to pull an MGS3 and recontextualise mainline entries in the Zelda series. This has a negative impact on Imprisonment’s roster of characters as well because apart from the sages, King Raura, the Mysterious Construct and Zelda, Age Of Imprisonment has to invent a bunch of nobodies who aren’t ever mentioned in the plot. You don’t even get additional outfits, Zelda looks so silly running around in her robe-dress-bath towel thing instead of some proper armour, most of the cast suffers from this.
All of that being said, every character is fun to play and the way Zonai devices are incorporated into combat is supremely entertaining. Rather than just having traditional special moves, the Mysterious Construct has different combos depending on what devices you choose to equip, whoever came up with this stuff is a genius. My favourite so far is either Calamo or Zelda herself, I prefer characters who attack fast and can get out of danger quickly.
There is quite some depth to the weapon upgrade system and buffs you can equip at a camp pre-mission but I didn’t really bother to learn it all because Age Of Imprisonment is too easy.
I’m going to preface this by saying that not every game has to be challenging, especially Nintendo-published Switch 2 titles with the Zelda name on them but I think my great-grandfather could 100% Age Of Imprisonment… and he’s been dead for about 20 years. I’m on the final mission of Chapter 3 (out of 6) and playing on Hard but I’ve died just a single time in my playthrough and never failed a mission objective, in the least arrogant way possible, I find 99% of the games I play too easy but this takes the cake, it should at least cause me to pause for thought before diving into a swarm on Hard.
Missions in Age Of Imprisonment don’t really feel like battles either. In the original Hyrule Warriors and in other musou games control of the different outposts ebbs and flows, each side gaining and losing; objectives are an additional requirement on top of winning control of the map. In Age Of Imprisonment, enemies basically never capture outposts back and you can safely ignore the wider battle, rush for objectives and pass the mission with ease. This part really disappointed me.
Breaking up the endless chain of hack and slash battles are these air missions where you play as the Mysterious Construct in its jet form with Calamo on the back to ensure that you can’t just enjoy the combat in peace. There aren’t many of these but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of them. Some people have been saying they’d play a whole game just like this: locking on to enemies, blasting away with the Construct’s laser… It’s such a shame that’s never been done.
I’ve Run Out Of Puns… Of The Kingdom
Musou games are not for everybody. Musou are repetitive, mindless button mashers that rely on spectacle and the player’s dedication to clearing the map while enjoying the inventiveness of the roster’s move-sets to break up the monotony but for those of you like me who enjoy this genre, Age Of Imprisonment is worth paying full price for, full stop. This game is a marked improvement upon Age Of Calamity, which I never even bothered finishing.
But… Age Of Imprisonment still doesn’t reach the dizzying heights that the original Hyrule Warriors did back on the Wii-U.
There is no extra mode, there aren’t any particularly exciting hidden characters or post-game unlocks, no outfits or nothing; split-screen is an option for extended fun but essentially? What you see is what you get.
Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment isn’t exactly topping the charts and I doubt Geoff Keighley’s Game Awards will pay any lip service to an entry in a genre that critics have historically despised but I guarantee that if you put money down on this game and don’t expect it to be a life-changing, generational masterpiece then you will not be disappointed.
Fun game, fair price, lots of content, happy Scanlines.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post, as always I’ll be happy to chat in the comments below and please like and subscribe to the Journal for more.
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Lovely review. I don't now these types of games or much about the Zelda franchise so I also learned a lot. :) I was intrigued by this game as I also thought it looked to be a nice looking game on the switch 2 and I could learn a bit more Zelda lore. Seems to do a nice enough job of that.
Loved the review! It's a shame this one didn't deliver to expectations as I really enjoyed the BotW / TotK world building and would love to play a cannon presentation of the Age of Imprisonment.