I had never played a proper entry in the murder marathon that is the Dynasty Warriors franchise before picking up its Legend of Zelda spin-off, but I had played enough of another of its branching titles, Mystic Heroes, to know that I had a fondness for the combat that is often ridiculed for its apparent lack of depth and mindlessness. And, while Hyrule Warriors is at its best when you’re simply mashing Y and X to see the same over-the-top attack animations over and over again, there is a surprising amount of complexity in discovering the ways to most efficiently eradicate enemy troops that makes experimenting with the different characters in the games roster rewarding. There is, unfortunately, a long list of flaws that keep Hyrule Warriors from being a safe recommendation for anyone who isn’t already a fan of either the Dynasty Warriors or Zelda franchises.
Although Hyrule Warriors has two main modes that differ largely in their structure, the game’s campaign, dubbed “Legend Mode,” best demonstrates the core gameplay, which consists of mowing through the rank and file troops of the enemy’s army with little more effort than is required to cut the grass in a Zelda game – a ready comparison, as there is indeed Zelda-style grass to cut – in an effort to keep your Allied Base safe. To prevent your base from falling, you set out to take control of enemy keeps to prevent reinforcements from spawning, allowing you to focus on whatever objectives appear throughout a mission. In addition to hordes of enemy grunts who can be dispatched simply by attacking, there are enemy captains, commanders and even giant bosses who receive little to no damage unless you wait for them to perform certain attacks that expose their weakness gauge, which lets you deal large amounts of damage to them when it’s depleted.
When Hyrule Warriors simply lets the player experiment with combat within the generally broad mission structure of its Legend Mode, it offers an extremely engaging experience that is sustained not only by the fanservicey aspect of seeing Zelda characters perform flashy, over-the-top moves based with varying degrees of fidelity on the characters’ appearances in their own franchise but also by how greatly playing as each character can influence your play style.
Your primary mode of combat consists primarily of inputting different combinations of normal and strong attacks. Although the basic inputs are largely the same from character to character, with the key difference being how many times they can follow a normal attack with a strong attack, the actual result can vary widely. Every character has at least one combo attack that’s suited to crowd control and one that’s suited to juggling a single enemy, but a character’s strength and speed ratings as well as how late these attacks come out in his or her combo will strongly influence your style of play. Several characters also have unique mechanics tied to them. Sheik, for instance, ends each combo with an attack of a different elemental property such as water, fire or lighting, and whichever was the last element used determines the song Sheik plays on her harp with a simple strong attack. Ending a combo with a lightning attack, for example, will make her play the Song of Storms, creating a whirling barrier of lightning that buffets enemies around just by running into them.
The other moves in your arsenal you’ll be using most often are special attacks and Focus Spirit attacks. Special attacks can be executed when a yellow meter beneath a character’s hearts is filled. The meter is filled by dealing and receiving damage as well as collecting pickups in the shape of Triforce fragments. Special attacks freeze time for the duration of their animation, and they generally have large areas of effect and lots of power, making them useful for clearing keeps and wearing down an enemy’s weakness gauge. The Focus Spirit meter looks like the magic meter from the Zelda games, and as such, is filled by picking up the same magic bottles. When the meter is full, activating Focus Spirit makes a character faster and stronger for a time and also enables the use of a powerful attack that will reveal an enemy’s weakness gauge at the price of expending the meter, should the player press the activation button again. Simply letting the meter run out, on the other hand, will still result in a powerful attack, but not one that reveals and enemy’s weakness gauge, making it let useful if you want to speed up a fight with a commander or a giant boss.
Where Hyrule Warriors stumbles, then, is with its other primary feature: Adventure Mode. Unlike Legend Mode, Adventure Mode consists of a series of challenges framed by the map from the original Legend of Zelda. The map is divided into a large grid, and your progress is dependent upon a number of conditions. Most often, these conditions will be the geographical features of the map, such as if there’s a lake in your way, or being able to clear a given challenge with the minimum rank required to advance. On occasion, the way forward may be blocked because you need to unlock a character to participate in a certain challenge or because you need to use the compass item from Zelda to reveal hidden enemies. Other items from the first Zelda are used to reveal the secrets of a given panel, which translates to unlocking the ability to earn a new reward from a mission. These rewards maybe new weapons, pieces of heart or heart containers, or even new characters.
While Adventure Mode does offer some fun and genuinely difficult challenges, these are the challenges that most closely resemble the missions in Legend Mode. Most often, however, Adventure Mode challenges tend to be shorter, focusing on a single objective. Some of these objectives are fine, such as having to kill a certain number of enemies within a time limit or having to defeat a certain number of enemy commanders while all damage is greatly increased for both sides. But, when it comes to missions that require you to defeat small groups of enemy captains of a bunch of giant bosses, a problem with the weakness gauge system becomes apparent.
Since the damage you deal to captains and giant bosses with their guard up is mostly negligible, these challenges involve a lot of waiting for the enemy to make a move. In many cases, enemies will have some trait you can exploit to make them reveal their weakness gauge sooner, such as standing a certain distance away from them to trigger an attack that makes them vulnerable. But, as is often the case with commanders, such exploits may not exist. You can mitigate your wait by leveling up your character and using the materials and rupees you find in battle to purchase badges that enable you to deal more damage guarding enemies and make their weakness gauges deplete more quickly, but doing so to the point where the time you save becomes meaningful sort of defeats the challenge these missions are supposed to offer.
Outside of these Adventure Mode challenges, however, waiting for stronger enemies to attack isn’t really a problem, as you’ll have hordes of trash enemies to keep you occupied and even fill your special attack meters so as to dispatch the leaders more quickly. But, when you find yourself in a situation where you’re fighting multiple captains at once, the game’s lock-on system can become a nuisance, as the direction you need to move the right thumbstick in order to change target seems to vary given how enemies are positioned on the map. What’s worse is that, when you’re fighting captains and a giant boss, and you want to target the captain that’s directly in front of you, you will instead lock on to the giant boss if it’s anywhere near you.
The mini-map can also be a problem, as areas in Hyrule Warriors tend to be large and filled with many small, branching paths. This makes it hard to keep track of all the different notices that appear throughout missions until you know what to look for. In the case of receiving mission objectives, this isn’t a big deal, as all you have to do is look for the current objective beneath the mini-map or at the Wii U gamepad screen to see a record of the most recent dialog. Missing other notices, however, such as those regarding allied units or keeps that are in danger, usually requires that you pause the game and navigate through some menus to find out exactly where to go. But, even by pausing, you can’t double check the direction certain units are heading if you happen to miss the dotted line that appears on the mini-map, which can often result in mission failure from the loss of your Allied Base. The game also does not let you know that your Allied Base is under attack unless one of your allied commanders happens to be in it. You will eventually learn to compensate for these shortcomings, but until you do, it can be frustrating to fail a mission that was otherwise going well.
It is worth noting that Hyrule Warriors supports two-player co-op in both Legend Mode and Adventure Mode, with one playing using a Wii Remote and nunchuk to play on the television, and with the other playing solely on the Wii U gamepad. Playing co-op causes a significant drop in overall framerate, with animations simply looking a bit rough in the best situations and with so many frames being skipped that characters seemingly teleport short distances at its worst. Fortunately, the latter typically only happens in the more challenging missions with greater numbers of enemies while playing as characters whose attack animations are more complex.
Despite its flaws, the core of what Hyrule Warriors has to offer is really exciting. There are countless little references to several generations of Zelda littered throughout every aspect of the game. The badges that upgrade your characters are named after Zelda items that didn’t make their way into the action. Bombchus are now sedan-sized siege weapons you’ll either have to escort or destroy. And Darunia’s victory animation has him dancing for far longer than is reasonable. Even after seeing all of the game’s references, experimenting with the different strengths and weakness of each character is plenty of reason to continue playing. But, without reverence for either the Dynasty Warriors or the Zelda franchise, it’s difficult to see someone being able to look past the game’s flaws and have a good time with it.