Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment review — Links in a chain

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity filled in some of the gaps left by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s story. It may have taken a different, non-canon turn by the end, but it was a fun romp through Hyrule’s past in the Musou style. Now, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment seeks to do the same thing for Tears of the Kingdom, leading more directly into that title this time. Despite having a rough roadmap for the plot, gameplay, and overall structure, Age of Imprisonment has a much tougher task ahead of it: keeping it all interesting. After all, it can’t rely on the novelty of a Zelda Musou now that we’re three titles into this sub-series, and you won’t be guessing where the story will go. Is this bygone tale up to the task, or is it ancient history?

Age of Imprisonment begins with Zelda being thrown back in time to the age of Hyrule’s founding. There, she meets Raru, Sonia, and the rest of the Sages as they wage war against Ganondorf, the Demon King. The story will hit all the beats you expect it to, along with a few new ones, as it fully assumes you’ve already played Tears of the Kingdom; no need to re-explain things like the Secret Stones or Draconification. I appreciate the expedience, but the plot can feel like it’s moving in fast forward the whole time. Despite the main story taking around 30 hours, it breezes past every plot point, including the ending. It’s all played very safe, giving you just a bit of additional context and newness without lingering on any one thing.

It’s a very counterintuitive plot, as anyone playing this game is probably at least a little interested in learning more about the Sages, Raru, Sonia, Zelda’s time in the past, and the division in the Gerudo between those who support Ganondorf and those who support Hyrule. You do get a little bit of that, but not nearly enough to be satisfying. I’m not talking about simple lore details either, there are some neat revelations in that regard, but the story and characters can feel paper thin even in the context of Zelda. You’d also think a game that absolutely cannot have Link in it in any form would focus instead on Zelda, but you’d be wrong there. Once the Mysterious Construct is introduced - who happens to look, act, and sound like Link but, due to temporal copyright laws, is not Link - the story focuses almost entirely on him and his Korok buddy Calamo. The cutscenes are all pretty long, and a ton of that time is spent on reiterating how cool and powerful this Construct is. The story as a whole just feels meandering and unnecessary. 

Gameplay wise, Age of Imprisonment plays exactly like Age of Calamity, and most other Musous, just with a few extra mechanics sprinkled on top. The basics remain mashing the Y button for normal attacks, then ending combos with X for different, powerful moves. As you defeat enemies, you build up a special attack meter. Once fully, you can spend this meter by pressing A for a big, high damage AoE. Sometimes enemies will use unique moves of their own, which can be countered with one of four attacks accessible in a quick menu. After countering, you’ll see a pie shepherd meter start breaking down as you attack. Once this has emptied, you can hit that enemy with a weakpoint strike for even more damage. Like Pokémon, the Musou genre has a baseline level of fun, of mashing buttons and seeing hundreds of grunts launch into the air every time you swing a sword. It’s mindless, but enjoyable. 

Age of Imprisonment adds a few new things. For one, you don’t have to be so precious with your counter abilities anymore as you now have Zonai devices to serve the same purpose in a pinch or hit elemental weaknesses. Using a Zonai device will drain your battery, which is shared between all characters, and it will only recharge once you hit 0 so you want to make liberal use of them. You’ll unlock more devices as you progress through the story too, and using a menu on D-Pad right any character can use any of them at a moment’s notice. They’re a good addition to the formula, but I don’t find the rock-paper-scissors counter system that interesting generally.

Continuing the themes of Tears of the Kingdom, two characters can join hands and team up for Sync Strikes once both of their Sync Meters are full. Some pairs will have unique moves with each other, such as Raru and Zelda, while others have more generic attacks used in sequence or buffs applied to the player. The unique moves are what I tended to try and use most often as they felt more effective, but the game has a lot of playable characters including more than a few generic soldiers, so you’ll be seeing a lot of both. I like the idea of Sync Strikes and anticipating how to use them well adds to the chaos management appeal of Musous, but they can feel pretty negligible in terms of raw damage. This is especially true in the late game as foes have tons and tons of HP to make them “harder” to defeat. 

There’s another big frustration that pops up more and more as you progress. Early on, the mission select map will be taken over by Ganondorf’s army, and you can complete special missions to take back territory. You can’t finish supply tasks or use shops unless you’ve taken back the area, so you’re greatly incentivized to take back as much of the map as you can. After a certain amount of time has passed, these areas will be in danger of being lost to Ganondorf once more, so you need to complete another mission to prevent this before four battles have passed. In short, you need to do maintenance on the map constantly. These preventative missions aren’t long, but they pop up so often it gets incredibly annoying. It gets to the point where literally every other mission you’re doing is one of these defensive ones. This mechanic genuinely feels like finally finishing work for the day, then getting an email from your boss about one more small thing you need to do before you leave. Eventually, I just had to stop doing them to actually finish the game, and I faced no real consequences.