Now I’m going to have to come out and say, after further looking into it I should not have given Fire Emblem Warriors as high a mark as I did. Characters were reused a lot  and the choice of characters in the opening line up before dlc left some glaring omissions and had too many of the Fates characters (while leaving Azura one of the most important characters in the game out so they could go on about Xander and Ryoma far too much). But I’m today going to be talking about the game that came earlier, one that was far better and very successful, to the point later on they brought out a Switch port of it (after Fire Emblems) so when you compare the two, this version looks massively better than that one. (Definitive Edition of Hyrule Warriors came out after Fire Emblem Warriors by the way, I was referring to the original Wii U version as having come out first).

Hyrule Warriors Original came out on the Wii U a console that while having good games and good ideas, wasn’t marketed well so ultimately got passed on by many people (having a big patch day one turned me off for a while, used to have poor internet back then). You take control of one of the many characters from the Zelda series, be it new interpretations of the core characters Link, Zelda, Ganondorf and a few others. major and minor characters from some of the eras of the franchise that appear like Minda and Daruma or even brand new characters made for the series, like villainess Cia or Linkle who is basically female Link (and everyone was ok with this). You take control of one of these and mow down monsters in massive numbers with combos and special attacks. Grab hold of bases and lead your army to victory, by slaughtering thousands.( I’m not joking to get good ranking on maps you need to kill over 1000 enemies assuming it’s ones you can do that)

Unlike that OTHER GAME, each character actually is different, no two play alike and some characters even have more than one type of weapon they can use (Link has a lot of different weapon choices, including a horse). This means when you get a weapon, you know who it goes to.

While the core gameplay remains the same in all modes there is a lot to do. This version of the game on the Switch contains EVERYTHING that was dlc before in both the Original Hyrule Warriors and its 3ds port. So that means ALL the bonus characters and bonus maps are in this to be unlocked and completed. But perhaps you don’t realize how much that is. Well I’ll tell you. You start off with 17 characters at the start and 13 more to be unlocked, not to mention all the additional weapons Link, Zelda, Impa, Ganondorf, Lana and Linkle can equip and all 5 different levels of those weapons to be unlocked by playing the 32 Legends(story mode) levels and littered throughout the many MANY adventure mode maps. Oh yes and the all the golden skulltulas to collect, different character skins and just plain fun extra modes like playing as the final boss. Basically this game has weeks worth of content WEEKS if not months! All without any dlc or additional money, yes this is all in the game for what you paid for it. This is a really good deal! Also in this day and age with DLC and micro transactions it’s soo good to see this much level of content as something you have to unlock  by actually playing the game, I miss that.

That being said the game play is very much the same over the game. Though each character is different and plays differently (and not just in attacks but in unique effects) the basic game play is very, repetitious. Not that that’s entirely bad, in fact mowing down an army as Ganondorf can be quite relaxing at times.

That said there are things that set this apart from other Warriors’ games, in that there are also giant enemies that require a bit more strategy to take down. You see you also get some of the classic items from Zelda games and use them to create weakness in giant monsters, King Dodongo charging up a fire-ball, throw bombs into its mouth and then wait on it. This can lead to some frustration with some of them as they just don’t seem to be doing the move that lets you then use the item to kill them which can be massively frustrating on timed maps (looking at you  Manhandla ). Also not helped that since some of the characters are from Skyward Sword they took the worst boss in Zelda history, the imprisoned, and he’s also the worst boss in this game as fighting him just takes sooo much longer than all the other giant monsters, even Ganon.

I do however love this game and at times that no other major game is out, in those dry spells find it something to come back to as I chip away at more and more of that massive amount of content. Also I really like the villainess Cia they made for this game oh and the music is really good, go look it up Eclipse of the sun is one of my favourites.

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