Hyrule Warriors Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

[Azure Sage]

Another stream already!!! We're being spoiled. I wanna see Mipha gameplay and Zora's Domain, and I wanna hear Impa's english voice. Looking forward to this.

 

[Spirit]

Another stream already!!! We're being spoiled. I wanna see Mipha gameplay and Zora's Domain, and I wanna hear Impa's english voice. Looking forward to this.

Aaawww, yeaaaaaah!

 

[Sheikah_Witch]

New stream !! YES!

 

[Azure Sage]

So, the treehouse stream was really good! They showed a lot of exciting stuff. I'm gonna try to collect my thoughts as well as I can, so here goes.

• We saw Urbosa gameplay and she looks incredible. Lightning-fast (haha) sword attacks, movements that resemble dancing, charging and unleashing power, even taking advantage of the electricity in the air. So cool.
• Gerudo Desert map is huge. It not only includes the town but the entire northern half of the desert and possibly even into the gorge a bit.
• We saw Zelda gameplay for the first time! I had my doubts about her being playable in story mode until she unlocks her sealing powers, but there she was. I had those doubts because she was present for both of the battles we saw on TGS day 2 but she wasn't playable. But she was playable there in Gerudo Desert, so hm. At any rate, her moveset looks very technical. She doesn't have any direct attacks. Besides using runes and items like everyone else, her moveset exclusively uses the slate in a bunch of interesting ways.
• Cool to see Molduga appear, and to lure it out with remote bombs like in BotW. That was really neat. I bet we'll see more missions like that.
• We got to see the world map, and boy does it look amazing. It gave me the impression that story mode, free mode, and adventure mode were all combined into one mode here. The map is vast and packed full of sidequests to do, some of which give you new weapons and gear and others take the place of badges to teach your characters new moves. Plus we see that some spots are used multiple times for questlines, so there could potentially be hundreds of these missions for all we know!
• We also got to see the smithy and upgrade system for Link, which is neat. It's cool to see how they brought BotW's weapon system into this game. Weapons don't break anymore, but you can fuse them together to make them stronger. And at least for Link, there are three weapon types to choose from. We haven't yet seen how weapons are handled for the other characters. I wanna see Zelda have the slate as one weapon type and her sealing powers as a separate weapon type.
• We saw how costumes work, which is also lifted right from BotW's armor system. That's really cool. I had a hunch it might work that way, and I was right. I wanna see how it works on the other characters, though. Do they get three parts for costume mixing and matching too? I kinda hope so but I feel like that might be difficult to do for them. Might just be one whole-body thing.
• We also saw cooking, so materials are used for more than just upgrading your character, which is really cool. Food gives buffs that you can put in effect for the battle before going in, so there's always a reason to use your materials just like in BotW. I like this a lot.
• Towers are apparently bases for Link to set up camp in and depart on battles via warping from. I feel like it would've been better to have the towns as bases instead, for consistency reasons, but whatever. We haven't really seen what you can do at base besides the world map, assuming there are other things. I'm really curious about that.
• We saw Impa with a new move that's a giant frog summon. Reminds me of Naruto, lol. That frog probably has to do with the frog guardian statue things in Kakariko Village, maybe. We also heard a bit of her english voice, though it was very muffled by the commentary. The small bit we could hear sounded very good, imo.
• We saw a boss monster battle for the first time. That Hinox sure could scuttle around pretty fast, lmao. I was really happy to see that battling bosses doesn't require items to expose weak points like in the first HW game.
• This is just a thought I had afterward, but if we do see DLC, I think it'd be really easy for them to do it by adding more quest points on the world map.

I might have more thoughts when I can watch the stream again.... if I can find it separate from the pikmin stream and not as part of some random youtuber's live commentary.

 

[Azure Sage]

Just my luck, this came up shortly after I made my last post, lmao. So here it is for anyone who missed it.

 

[the8thark]

Firstly to comment on some of @Azure Sage points above.

• Very well thought out post. Well done.
• I also like the larger maps that are segmented so they are not 95% empty like in Dynasty Warriors 9. Well that's the hope, soon we shalls ee if that's correct.
• I like Zelda's gameplay too. Even though the 3 presenters haz zero clue about anything musou, we all understood what was happening on screen. In particular I liked her musou attack.
• I also like how runes and abilities are used in this game
• It seems that the three weapon types might work like in FE or Warriors 8. The whole weapon triangle thing.
• The weapon fusion system to me looks really bland and uninteresting but functionally very good and something everyone will easily understand and make good use of.
• The move away from waiting for boss weak points to expose themselves was a necessary change. It was one fo the worst things in Hyrule Warriors. It's was something that almost no other Warriors game did. For all the obvious reasons.
• Towns should have been the bases, not the towers. The towers make zero sense.

My additional thoughts.

• The armour badges from HW being gone is a good thing as they were broken (ie worthless in game)
• The map feels like DW9 without the bland nothingless this infects 95% of that game's map. We shall see how much better AoC's map is, but so far it looks ay least a little better.
• I like all of the musou attacks shown in the gameplay. They all seem useful and look interesting on screen.
• We have no word yet on the performance of the game. Also things like "is there any delay before dashing" and other technical aspects of the musou, Nintendo is not sharing with is. Of cause we'll find out at launch but it would be nice if Nintendo actually talked about this beforehand. Hyrule Warriors didn't run too well on Switch but it was acceptable. Most Musou do have some slowdown in the busier parts of the game. I notice it when playing them on the PS4 Slim.

Finally
Fanboys or fangirls should not do Treehouse live streams. Nintendo need to get in people who actually understand what they are playing.

 

[Azure Sage]

We could see on the map that they completed story quests in the champion hometowns so they should have unlocked all the champions, but here we see Revali is greyed out and unavailable. Is that for story reasons? Does he go through a rebellious phase and you can't use him for a couple chapters? That seems like something he'd do. I remember in his diary he said he turned down being a champion the first time to make Zelda sweat it out. Maybe that's what this is?

Also only four of the characters have arrows on them. Maybe we have a "main party" type of thing that gets auto selected for battles that we can adjust as we want?

 

[Azure Sage]

Another new character trailer! This time we see Master Kohga in all his burly glory, a new type of Yiga blademaster, and even an original character?! He seems to have the Gerudo symbol on his cloak.... I wonder if he's related to Ganon more than he is the Yiga. Very curious.

 

[Spirit]

I don't care about Kohga, I thought he was lame in BotW.

Gonna be interesting to see any OC, especially villains, in such a canon-linked game. He reminds me of Jafar from Aladdin.

 

[Sheikah_Witch]

Who is at the end though?

 

[Spirit]

Who is at the end though?

 

[Fraxinus]

Methinks its the fortune teller or whatever. Who worked for the royal family who foresaw the calamity. I think it makes a lot of sense to me that they would have been aligned with the Yiga.

 

[Dio]

Another new character trailer! This time we see Master Kohga in all his burly glory, a new type of Yiga blademaster, and even an original character?! He seems to have the Gerudo symbol on his cloak.... I wonder if he's related to Ganon more than he is the Yiga. Very curious.

Hmm that's interesting how Kohga is able to live so long. I am happy to see him again though. Am interested by this fortune-telling looking character. Perhaps Agahnim or something similar.

 

[Spiritual Mask Salesman]

We have another video:



The main highlight seems to be Koroks.

 

[Azure Sage]

Wow, lots of good stuff in this one.

• we see more of Link's armor sets. I'm happy to see the hylian tunic and hood.
• koroks galore! hetsu sounds adorable, and very very familiar. My gut reaction is to say Cassandra Lee Morris, but I could be wrong.
• we hear Impa's english voice more clearly. she sounds very good.
• we see more rune abilities for other characters, which is nice.
• seems like everyone has their own paraglider. very curious. I wonder where they're headed off the tower like that...
• we get some more peeks at maps we haven't seen yet. I'm pretty sure we saw a bit of the great plateau area map that we saw in the kohga trailer.
• we hear the hyrule field battle music clearer than in the stream and man i love it
• we see Link throw and catch a boomerang. neat.

Exciting stuff! I wonder how many more of these untold chronicles videos we're gonna get.