Hyrule Warriors Legends (Part 3)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Yeah, still not done. Honestly, it feels like there’s no end to this thing.

Fairies and collectibles

I haven’t mentioned them much, but true to Legend of Zelda fashion, fairies are an important part of the game. You always select a fairy before entering a battle, and they provide bonuses throughout the battle. You begin with a few, but you can find more. Each fairy has a main element.

The mode has a few options: Dining Room, where you can feed fairies with the foods you occasionally find during battles. They also have personality traits, which influence the spells and abilities you can give them. Each type of food comes in three strengths, and foods influence specific personality traits on a fairy; stronger foods change the traits a lot more. However, these foods can also decrease some traits’ stats. This will also increase the fairy’s Level, and when a fairy hits Level 99, you can choose to revert her back to Level 1 with additional perks.

You can also dress up each fairy using fairy clothing you can find during missions. This will empower them in certain elements. Last but not least, you can change a fairy's passive Rental Skill at the School, where the skills unlocked depend on the personality values you’ve given the fairy. "Party" was an option to connect online with other players, but... yeah. I'm late to the "Party" on that one.

You can't see it too well, but that IS a Skulltulla there
on the floor.

You don’t only have fairies to collect, though… there’s also Gold Skulltulas. Another LoZ staple, Skulltulas are found in every mission of Legend Mode, with many more in the Adventure Mode. After certain criteria are met, these spiders will appear on the field. Kill one, and it drops a piece of a picture. Every illustration is made of 20 pieces, and there are 13 of those – that makes 260. In every mission where they appear, there’s two. However! You cannot go for both spiders on your first go through Legend Mode, as the second spider can only be found after Legend Mode was beaten once, and hidden on higher difficulties. Like this game isn’t long enough already!

Well, I'm nowhere close to being done.

And if that’s still not enough, you can also try to get every Medal. Those are basic achievements obtained as you play through the game, and some requirements are rough. Let's just say, good luck.

But then, there’s also…

Adventure Mode(s)

Yeah, plural. The Adventure Mode would be a brilliant idea even if it was singular, though; imagine a set of missions entirely based on the original Legend of Zelda’s map, with one mission per screen. Doesn’t seem that bad? Let me remind you that TLoZ was an 8X16 map, which translates to 128 missions. What’s more, the map is designed with areas unlocking based on how far into Legend Mode you’ve gotten, and there are blockades between map tiles wherever you wouldn’t have been able to cross, so it's a maze.

Welp, time to explore.

Oh, I'm getting a good reward here.

In every mission, you are encouraged to try and go for a gold medal, represented by an A grade. You get those at the end of a mission based on a few factors: How many enemies you defeated, how much total damage you took (less is better), and how much time you took. Several squares have additional rewards locked behind the A grade. Your progress in the Adventure Mode can also be tied to this, as whenever you gain access to a new screen, you can see the letter grades you need to unlock the squares around it (ex. A C grade means it’s unlocked upon completion of the mission, as it’s the lowest you can get; you’ll have to put in more effort if you need a B or A grade). Rewards can include heart containers for specific characters, pieces of hearts, new characters not unlocked during the story mode, new costumes for various characters…

Several maps grant Item Cards to be used in Exploration Mode. The missions take place over Hyrule Warriors’ battle maps, not new ones inspired by the LoZ screens. Instead, you use Exploration Mode to find secrets on a screen, using the Item Cards; bombs to blow rocks up, candles to burn trees, the power bracelet to push things around, and so on. This often unlocks additional rewards you can obtain by getting a good grade on a mission.

Through its Adventure Mode, Legends wastes no time
spoiling the presence of the Wind Waker "Toon" characters.

The scenarios in Adventure Mode don't all make sense,
not that it matters anyway.

I bought my copy of Hyrule Warriors Legends secondhand, so I don’t know how much is held in this copy. The original game on the Wii U had a lot of stuff already, and Legends added even more; then, everything was available on the Switch version, the Definitive Edition. However, everything in Legends was hidden behind DLCs and a season pass, and considering everything that’s in there, you can imagine I didn’t play through all of it for the review.

There's even a few bonus characters you can find through the maps in those DLC packs: Marin, Toon Zelda, Ravio and Yuga.

Here’s the list of everything you can have in Adventure Mode, provided all DLCs have been obtained:

-The original mode, 128 missions, as mentioned;

-A Master Quest version of it, also 128 missions;

-A map based on Wind Waker; it’s smaller, at a 7X14 grid for a total of 98. This one also comes in a Master Quest version afterwards (albeit this one is locked behind the Wind Waker DLC), for a total of 196 missions;

-A map inspired by Twilight Princess, 8X15 with some blank spots, for a total of 93 screens;

-A map based on Termina, from Majora’s Mask; this one, like the game it comes from, includes a timer that resets after a certain amount of time has passed, and you’ll lose your progress unless you’ve reached a screen with an owl statue (again, not unlike the game the map is based on). Only 85 maps spread across an 8X16 layout;

-A Koholint Island Map, part of the Link’s Awakening DLC. Just like the original game, this one ends when you reach the Wind Fish and “awaken” it. That’s another 84;

-A Grand Travels map as part of the Phantom Hourglass/Spirit Tracks DLC. That’s another 128;

-A map inspired by Lorule, so with a bit of both A Link to the Past and A Link Between Worlds in there, also locked behind a DLC. The gimmick here is that the map is split in half between Hyrule and Lorule, and you can only cross from one to another using a fissure. That’s yet another 128;

-And finally, the 13 Rewards Maps mentioned previously, the ones that open when you complete an illustration by finding all the Gold Skulltulas.

Give me just a second to pick my jaw off the floor...
(These maps come from a GitHub website to help players with progress in the Adventure Modes.)

PHEW!

For those at home who aren’t keeping track, that’s a grand total of 983 missions total, provided you did buy every single DLC.

I hope you’re not the completionist type, or you’ll never finish this game. Or maybe you will, but... you'll be playing a LONG while.

Final thoughts

The spirit of the franchise is respected. That's
one of the more important aspects.

Oof, I knew there would be quite a bit to say, but I had no idea just how much there would be to cover here. I will start by saying that if all Dynasty Warriors games are like this, just the same concept copy-pasted over and over, then I’m glad I played Hyrule Warriors instead, where I could use characters from a franchise I already enjoyed, in a setting and with gameplay that made great use of them. This hack'n'slash gameplay seems easy to adapt to other franchises, as Fire Emblem also had its game in the style.

And with so many characters chosen across the
franchise's history, we get quite the nice roster.

You can also use the touch screen to direct your
other characters towards specific areas or
enemies on the map. There's a decent strategic
aspect to the game, it's not just hack'n'slash.

It's a simple concept: Waging wars on various battlefields, with infinitely respawning enemies that can be defeated in a single attack, while others will require a lot more hits to go down. Capture an enemy fort, whittling down its HP by killing the enemies that guard it, then do the same to another fort; capture smaller outposts on the side. In the Story Mode, there are plenty of variations, like unaffiliated enemies, or having to fight against two opposing armies, either at once or one at a time. Deal with bosses and other major threats. Follow the story as it develops.

Ah, Ganondorf. As pleasant as ever.

You can read the many LoZ characters talking just as you’ve come to know them. That’s, in my opinion, the coolest aspect of the game. This game may be one of the best displays of fleshing out characters, and a big part of that comes from being able to play them. You don’t just play the regulars, Link or Zelda; you can play as Impa, Darunia, Midna (in two forms!), Zant, Volga, Cia, two more versions of Link, Fi, Ghirahim, Ganondorf himself, Ruto, Skull Kid, Tetra, Agitha… that’s not the full list. The best part is that they all have massive movesets that reference their abilities as seen throughout the franchise or their home game. Even one-time characters get to shine and kick as much ass as everybody else. Yep, even the characters not known for being combatants originally. That you can upgrade every character with badges by gathering the correct materials is only a bonus. Also cool that many bosses function a bit like in the Zelda series, with special items being required to properly defeat them (ex. Tossing bombs in King Dodongo’s mouth, etc.).

Bosses always surround themselves with enemies that die
in a single sword slash, everybody knows that.

My biggest issue, and one that I assume permeates all of Dynasty Warriors, is how repetitive gameplay eventually comes across once you’ve played a lot of it. In Legend Mode, the missions are lengthy, all taking easily upwards of fifteen minutes to complete if not more. And much of it comes down to mowing down hundreds, even thousands, of enemies. Sure, you pull off amazing combos, but it’s still the same over and over. Thankfully, you often get to play as multiple characters at once with the ability to swap at any moment, and you’re encouraged to approach these battles strategically to come out on top against unlikely odds. I’ve found myself more invested in the strategic aspect as a result. Victory and defeat conditions can change quite often within a single mission. It can force you to figure out a new course of action, but it can also come into conflict with whatever you were doing and cause an instant loss you cannot easily prevent if you’re in a bad spot. (Legend Mode missions autosave at specific moments, so you do have checkpoints to return to; in Adventure Mode, not so much.)

I also never quite felt the use of fairies. They’re good to have, but I fought almost every battle without using them at all, and didn’t feel much worse for wear for it.

There’s so much to do here: Gather materials for badges, craft the perfect weapon, spend rupees to train the characters you've unlocked, collect heart pieces or full containers, unlock new costumes, find Gold Skulltulas…

No joke, the high complexity of the collectibles (not to
mention their sheer amount!) in this game made it
necessary to use guides.

Oh, by the way, for every one of those in Legend Mode, you need to kill 1,000 enemies to find the first (and that’s if you can catch it before it disappears, and the current mission may not make that easy to do, since they can also be tough to find, and you may struggle to get to one in time!). Also, you cannot get the second Skulltula in any mission on your first run-through. Nope, gotta wait till Legend Mode is beaten (yes, all of it, including the Wind Waker arc). And THEN, it won't appear except on a higher difficulty. As if it wasn’t long enough already! Not to mention that killing so many enemies might take longer than on other consoles; while it is impressive that such a large game runs on the Nintendo 3DS, hardware limitations cause fewer enemies to appear at a time, and it has an impact on gameplay.

Pretty cool that we have a handful of classic Zelda bosses,
but I might have liked to have more, as we end up fighting
the same four ones over and over.

I’m a bit at a disadvantage; since I haven’t played them, I can’t compare with the other versions of the game (Wii U, Switch) to properly judge Legends in terms of performance. Still, I think a solid job was made in adapting such a massive game for a portable console. I doubt they could have done much better, considering the sheer amount of content you can have (or add). The loading times weren't so bad, but they were noticeable and frequent. Didn’t really run into issues with controls, I thought the game looked great (even on the smaller screens), and I quite enjoyed the soundtrack, especially the rock remixes of classic Zelda tracks.

I'm actually pretty cool with the inclusion of
Wind Waker characters, I just don't know why we
had to have that final arc at the end of Legend Mode.

Should you get Hyrule Warriors Legends? If you’re a big fan of Dynasty Warriors, you’ll find more of the same here. That said, I’m not sure I would recommend getting Legends specifically, since so much content is now locked behind DLC you can no longer purchase. (Not that the game isn’t already packed to the bursting point without it, mind you, with a long Story Mode and an even longer Adventure Mode.) You will, however, get even more by getting the Definitive Edition on the Switch instead. As for me, I did enjoy my time, but it was mainly because it’s using a franchise I already enjoy; the repetitiveness did get tiring by the end, and I couldn't wait for that Story Mode to end. This type of game won’t be for everybody.

Alright, that about does it. What else was I planning to cover this year… Hm, I should try to squeeze in a Wii game review in November…