I recently got to play around 20 minutes of the newest Hyrule Warriors game, Age of Imprisonment, and there’s a lot for fans of Zelda and Musou games to be interested in. For the former, it’ll come as exciting news that Age of Imprisonment is canon. While Age of Calamity was pretty wishy-washy with alternate timeline ideas, Nintendo is going all-in for its follow-up and making everything you see in Age of Imprisonment true to the mainline story. We all know what happens in the end with Ganondorf, but there are, of course, a lot of questions about what happened before and after.
From a gameplay standpoint, Age of Imprisonment will let players get their hands on a good variety of characters from the canon and, given what I saw from just Zelda, Rauru, and Mineru, this is a very good roster filled with very exciting prospects.
During my time with Age of Imprisonment, we got to head underground with Rauru, Mineru, and Zelda, the latter of whom mentions that it is her first time in the depths and that she didn’t know it existed. Mineru explains that the depths have multiple sites of sacred power and that she’s been collecting constructs for her research. She wasn’t able to investigate the depths on her own until Zelda and her powers of light came along to give them the ole’ beatdown.
Each character, of course, had their unique style in combat, with Zelda both slashing with a strange Zonaite sword and wielding magical light projectiles; Rauru using spear and beam attacks; and Mineru utilizing a bunch of contraptions cobbled together from Zonai equipment.
I felt right at home plowing through Little Frox, Frox, and Constructs, as someone who played a whole lot of Age of Calamity, but even those with some experience with any Musou game will likely find it easy to pick up. From the first game, you still have your regular and strong attack combos, dashes, flurry rushes, guarding, weakpoint smashes, crafting materials; the whole shebang. Attacks are flashy, have massive areas of effect, and are always fun to dole out punishment with.
The R button menu has changed from the Sheikah Slate to unique skills in Age of Imprisonment. There’s both a powerful dashing and vertical attack, and Zonai devices to either use whenever you’d like, or, in a better use case, can be used to counter an enemy’s ability and slap ’em back in the face. The Y dashing version counters opponents dashing towards you, such as the construct’s forward lunge, which has been pulled straight out of Tears of the Kingdom. The X version counters aerial or jumping attacks, such as the Frox’s leap attack. These attacks can be used on their own for extra damage, but hitting specific counters seems much more worthwhile as they offer an opportunity to execute an extra follow-up at the end. These attacks have a cooldown, just like before with a successful use of a slate ability. The interesting thing is the A and B buttons are customizable Zonai equipment, each with specific properties that are changeable in the directional pad’s right menu. This lets you switch your loadout on the fly depending on what the enemies’ weaknesses are. The Zonai equipment uses Zonai batteries, which need to be replenished, however.
The cool thing about this is that some equipment can be placed into the environment and will operate automatically without your input, which can up the damage-dealing potential available. Since there’s no friendly fire, there’s a lot of opportunity to, for example, drop a flame emitter and work it into your overwhelming offense–thank Hylia.
Enemies also have traits and weaknesses that carry over from Tears of the Kingdom. Frox eat bombs, for example, and they’re still weak to shots to the eye or attacks to their backside ores. That means that if you played Tears, you’ll have a major leg up on the general idea of how to take on what you’re up against.
Where it really changes from Age of Calamity though is Sync Strikes. This is not just because it’s a powerful attack that requires two characters, but it’s because it needs two characters, and the nature of Musou games requires you to divide and conquer the map, making you strategize when characters should work together or go separately. This is an interesting twist on how these types of games are usually played.
Sync Strike attacks are the biggest game-changer in my opinion, because in the Age of Calamity, most characters were undertaking solo ventures and attacking different points of the map. But Sync attacks are so powerful that having two characters working together feels like a reliable way to plow through an enemy quickly and save time. This encourages you to strategize and always reconsider where to send units for best possible results, especially since Sync Strike attacks are slow to charge.
Each Sync Strike attack pair up varies depending on who is partaking and what you get ranges from multi-directional beams you can control to a completely alternate form like Mineru’s powered-up construct. This means that some of these attacks will likely be better or worse in some situations, so there will no doubt be plenty of opportunities to test and experiment to optimize builds and runs. Just thinking about the final possible roster for this game and designing an interacting Sync attack across all characters sounds like a very daunting task, but as players, that means there’s likely to be plenty of depth.
While the preview was fairly short, with a little teaser at the end, I got a pretty good idea of how good Age of Imprisonment feels, and it feels damn good. I think the fact that this game already has good legs, and I’m yet to see the characters I really want to see just makes me more excited for its release on November 6.
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