Another age, another war in Hyrule

Marcus Falcão / THE GATEPOST

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Arts & Features Editor When I heard that a new “Hyrule Warriors” game was being made, I was really excited. I actually love the gameplay in this series, even if it just seems like button mashing at first. “Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment” (AOI) is the prequel to “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” (TOTK). It is not to be confused with “Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity” (AOC), the non-canon spinoff prequel to “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” (BOTW). AOI shares many similarities with AOC, such as their titles, gameplay, locations, and how they even both introduce ancient robot characters that are crucial to saving the world. As such, it’s only natural to compare the two from time to time. AOI takes place during the era of Hyrule’s founding. Princess Zelda appears from the distant future - or TOTK’s present day - and stays with the royal family as she tries to figure out how to get home. Rauru is the founding King of Hyrule and the story follows his battles against the Demon King Ganondorf in the Imprisoning War, following the lore TOTK set up. But in order to keep the story fresh, many new characters were added. In fact, the majority of the cast are new characters. This was somewhat unavoidable though. “Hyrule Warriors” always have a large cast of playable characters, one of the several stark contrasts from the mainline “The Legend of Zelda” series. Part of the reason AOC did as well as it did was because it relied on the fan-favorite characters from BOTW. But AOI’s status as a canon prequel instead of a spinoff meant almost all of TOTK’s cast couldn’t be included without severely changing the original story. Even the Sages, who are important characters to the plot, were never given names or even faces in TOTK. While AOI definitely succeeds in making an original story that loosely fits into the canon, I think it would’ve been better otherwise. The story feels almost as absurd as AOC at times, and that game took a tragedy and gave it an “everyone survives and lives happily ever after” ending. Here, a new character is shoehorned into the plot and is easily the most powerful out of the cast - The Mysterious Construct. The Mysterious Construct is a robot designed for battle by the ancient Zonai. It also looks and fights a lot like Link, for reasons that are explained late in the story. Link is canonically a very strong and capable fighter, and the Mysterious Construct is no different. It also has the ability to fly, and when it takes off the gameplay switches to shooting down enemies across Hyrule’s skies. It feels like AOC’s Divine Beast battles, but adjusted to incorporate TOTK’s sky islands and Depths. But while it’s great gameplay-wise, the Mysterious Construct hurts the overall story. It gets so much screentime that it weakens Zelda’s story. With Link not in the game, I expected AOI to give Zelda a meaningful story that builds up to the sacrifice she makes in TOTK’s flashbacks. Instead, she’s essentially sidelined by the new guy. Admittedly, this version of Zelda has already grown during her first journey in BOTW, but instead of growing more or at least taking the lead it feels like she’s just a supporting character. Even the game’s finale focuses significantly more on the Mysterious Construct than Zelda and Rauru, detracting from both of their stories. It reminds me of “The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom,” a game where Zelda is the main character and Link is captured. In that game, Zelda is given the ability to magically fight and even look more like Link for limited periods of time, and it’s expected that the player uses this for boss fights especially. It’s like Nintendo can’t let a Zelda game not focus on Link in some crucial way, even though there have been several Zelda games where Zelda herself is barely a character, if she’s even present. I didn’t like the “Swordfighter form” then, and I don’t like the Mysterious Construct now. Let Zelda actually stand on her own, a feat that hasn’t happened since… the CDI games in 1993? Yikes. Overall, the game is pretty fun, though I just don’t like the story. But it was certainly a choice to put a prequel of a Switch game only on the Switch 2. Rating: C Age of Disappointment