Recently completed
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. I sure have a lot to say about this game, but I'll try to keep myself short here.
haha, as if I even knew how to do that... 😂
I already loved the first Hyrule Warriors, with hundreds of hours invested into it. Literally the only thing about it I didn't enjoy all that much was the story. It was appropriate for what the game was trying to be - a celebration of Zelda, thus including characters from many different games and timelines - but that unfortunately made the story wild and chaotic, and as a result, not very great in my eyes. I actually ended up having most fun with the game's adventure mode, against my expectations.
Naturally, I was kinda excited for Age of Calamity. A new game based on the same gameplay style, but with a canonical (?), more focussed story and the potential for some refinements to the gameplay. In addition to that, putting focus on some events of the Breath of the Wild storyline that most players were interested in. Making a new Hyrule Warriors as a Breath of the Wild prequel really was the perfect opportunity.
So after completing the game, what do I actually think about it? Well, in some ways, I got what I was hoping for, and in other ways, I didn't. Generally speaking, I do think the game is an improvement over the first Hyrule Warriors, but there were some aspects I wasn't fully satisfied with, so let me go into detail.
First of all the gameplay. I do think that in most ways, the gameplay has improved compared to the first game. There's now way more different ways of attacking an enemy's weak point. Of course you can still just wait for them to expose it or use specific items at specific times. The first improvement already starts here, because most enemies will now actually respond to multiple items and get into the stances where you can use those items more often, so just from what that alone, it's already easier to attack a weak point and there's less waiting. For example Lynel's have three different attacks that can be countered with items, as well as having other attacks that regularly leave their weak points exposed for a while. On top of that, there's also some new methods, though. You can attack an enemy's head, which will always do weak point damage (but is difficult to do with most characters), you can use elemental magic, which will always expose an enemy's weak point gauge and even make it more vulnerable if it's the right element, and, my favorite addition, you can dodge attacks with perfect timing. Taken directly from Breath of the Wild, doing this will put the game into slow-motion and allow you to deal hefty damage to an enemy's weak point gauge. This is probably my favorite addition to the game, because not only does it add a great risk and reward mechanic to the game, but it also allows you to counter every single attack if you're good enough. All of these improvements combined make for a battle system that's way more skill-based and requires way less waiting. I like this, because bigger enemies in the first Hyrule Warriors could really become quite tedious to fight. Bosses were absolutely terribly to fight in that game, because they all just had a single weakness and tended to never expose it when you need them to.
Another notable improvement is the way items are used in the game. Instead of hectically switching through them with the D-Pad and then using them with a button, you now hold down a shoulder button and press a face button to use them. This allows you to easily access any item at any time, which in turn just made me use them all that much for. In the first game, switching items was so annoying that I just never used them if I didn't have to, but here, you can use any item whenever you want, so I actually used them all the time. This also ties into my first point of making weak point gauge's easier to destroy.
Another minor improvement is that checkpoints now also exist for side missions. The absence of this could be really frustrating in the first game's adventure mode, where you could be forced to replay an entire 15-minute mission because of a minor mistake. That's no longer the case here. However, all of the checkpoints are now automatic and activate whenever you complete certain tasks. There is no longer any manual saving. This can be impractical if the checkpoints activate at inconvenient times. For example, one reoccuring annoyance was the checkpoint activating right as I was facing away from my next target, so every time I'd restart from the checkpoint I'd have to first turn around my camera. Still, I'd rather have slightly annoying, unpredictable checkpoints than to have no checkpoints at all.
Now for a few things I'm kinda mixed about. First of all, bases. In general, I do like how bases got a redesign. They no longer have to fixed-size, sqaure-shaped rooms. I think the first game looked quite ugly due to this limitation. Instead, they can now pretty much just be any vaguely enclosed area, which makes for way more organic-looking maps. The game in general looks a lot better and, in my opinion, quite pretty. I know that some people will disagree here, but I personally found the game nice to look at. However, one thing that's kinda weird about bases is that they barely play a role in this game. There seems to be very little benefit from stealing an enemy's base, and enemies also don't seem to try stealing your own bases any longer. In my entire hard mode playthrough, I don't think they've done this even a single time. In general, stealing bases only really seems to be an objective for missions this time around and can more or less be ignored aside from that. However, I say my feelings on this are only "mixed" because I'm not sure if it really impacts the game in a negative way. I guess in theory, it's an element of strategy that plays less of a role now, but in practice, I don't think the game got any less fun to play because of this.
Another thing I'm mixed on is the game no longer featuring any form of teleportation. The original one had the Ocarina for this, which you could use to fly to owl statues across the map. This one doesn't have anything like that. If you need to get from point A to point B, you have no other options aside from running all the way. Again, though, my feelings on this are only "mixed", because I don't feel like it impcated the game negatively. In fact, I didn't even notice this feature was missing until very late into the game, and it was while doing some completely optional stuff. I think just being able to always control multiple characters already helps more than the teleportation ever did, and the design of missions requires geting from point A to point B quickly less often.
Finally, time to talk talk about some aspects of the gameplay that I mostly have negative feelings on. First of all, Korok seeds. I didn't like them, I don't think they did much for the game. I already wasn't a big fan of Skultullas in the first game, but at least there were only two of them per mission, and getting them could be a bit challenging, since they only appeared for a limited time and were often kinda well hidden. Koroks in Age of Calamity are basically less exciting version of that. There's way more of them per map, but they aren't cleverly hidden, and they aren't challenging to get. You pretty much just have to walk up to suspicious spots on the map and press A. At least the reward for finding them is more useful, but aside from that, I could do without them. Finding Koroks in Breath of the Wild was fun, but that was an exploration-based game, and the Koroks were often in clever places and even had puzzles tied to them. Age of Calamity, on the other hand, is such a hectic game that I just don't even feel like running around the map to search for Koroks.
Next, the playable characters. Age of Calamity somehow manages to once again have a respectable amount of them, and all of them are very unique, with probably even more different gameplay styles than in the first game. While at first this sounds like a positive (because there's more variation), it didn't actually end up being one for me. While more variation in theory is nice, the characters in this game all felt so different that I just never felt comfortable playing the majority of them, since I could never quite grasp how to play them. Link and Impa were the only ones that I really liked playing. Aside from that, there were a couple more that I could do just fine with, but also few others that I absolutely couldn't get into. Some characters really felt like a struggle. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if the game didn't once again force you to play as specific characters every now and then, especially for the side missions. I already disliked this aspect in the first game, and it didn't really change this time around.
And talking about side missions, one thing I disliked was that once again, the game tried its best to make these as annoying as possible. The first game was already quite good at that, but here it feels even worse, because they're actually integrated into the main game and have some side plots tied to them. I already mentioned forcing you to play as certain characters, but another thing I really disliked was that 95% of them were on a time limit. I can deal with playing as characters I don't like, I can even deal with playing as underleveled characters, but having to do all of that on a time limit is where it starts to feel like bullshit. Suddenly, most of these missions are no longer about skill, but just about making the attack stat of your characters high enough so that they can deal enough damage within the time limit. I even had to cheese some missions once again by using co-op mode, because I just couldn't see myself beating them with whatever character the game wanted me to play. The most annoying thing about this is that the time limit doesn't even make sense from a story perspective on 90% of these missions. The game is usually like "Kill these three random monsters in five minutes. What, it took you five minutes and one second? Too bad, we'll just revive all three of them, because unless you can do it in five minutes, we'd rather just get killed by them!". While I did complete all the side missions in the game, they did get quite frustrating, especially in the second half of the game.
I think with that, I have said everything I had to say about the gameplay, so now it's time to address the elephant in the room and talk about the story, but for that, I'll have to get into major spoilers, so be warned.
I'm kinda disappointed to say that the game's story did not quite deliver what Nintendo promised us. Pretty much every single trailer advertised it as a prequel to Breath of the Wild, but that was just a blatant lie. While the game starts out as pretty much just that, around the half-way point it starts pulling a Hyrule Warriors and resorts to the same timeline chaos shenanigans as the first game. So the little guardian that is travelling around with Link and his companions? It turns out to have time-travelling powers. The first half of the game pretty much just plays out like a Breath of the Wild prequel, and to me, that was the most enjoyable part of the story, but just as the four champions are about to die, the little guardian opens four time portals, calling their successors from the future (Riju, Yunobo, Teba and Sidon) to save them, thus creating an alternate timeline where, ultimately, the champions don't die and the calamity is defeated, thus preventing the events from Breath of the Wild from happening in the first place.
I just... don't really like how all of this played out. Final Fantasy VII Remake got a lot of criticism for even just implying an alternate timeline, which didn't bother me too much because we haven't seen the consequences of that yet, but Hyrule Warriors literally created an entire new timeline where everyone survives, and I haven't heard anyone talk about it. In all fairness, I was trying my best to avoid spoilers for the game, so I might have just missed all the discussions, but still, it seems weird.
Really, what bothers me most about this is just all the false advertisement. As I said, the game was advertised as a Breath of the Wild prequel to us, and even the name "Age of Calamity" sounds like it was referring to the events that lead to Breath of the Wild.
I can kinda understand why they did this. They just wanted to have more canonical playable characters in the game, so they came up with these time travel shenanigans to put characters from the future in there. I just don't think it was worth it. All of these characters in particular play like ass, so I don't think they really enrich the gameplay, and I really would have prefered a more serious take on a Warriors game, with an emotional story line putting some light on the events leading to BotW. Instead, they decided to go the Hyrule Warriors route once again and just put as many characters as possible into the game. I don't think this was necessary, as the first Hyrule Warriors was already a celebration of the Zelda franchise, hence Age of Calamity didn't need to be one as well. I guess if nothing else, I'm just disappointed about this missed opportunity, because I doubt we'll ever get another Breath of the Wild prequel again.
Now let me make this clear. I don't absolutely hate the story. I do think it lead to some fun interactions, especially between Urbosa and Riju and between Mipha and Sidon. It's also interesting to see a happier take on the BotW universe where even Zelda and Roahm managed to work out their problems and where the Yiga clan ended up becoming good. Doing this alternate time line stuff also allowed for the game to include an entirely new end boss, which I think was kinda cool. However, ultimately, I do think I would have preferred for this game to be an actual prequel.
So yeah, those are my thoughts on Age of Calamity. Overall, I liked the game a lot and think it was an improvement over the first game. If you liked that one, I also recommend giving this one a try as you will likely enjoy it. Just be aware that not all aspects of the game might turn out the way you expect them to.
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Okay, everything below will be a lot shorter, I promised.
I recently completed
Forgotton Anne and really enjoyed it. A beautiful, hand-animated adventure game with some strong Ghibli vibes and interesting characters that will easily kill a few hours. The gameplay feels a bit tanky and slow, probably as a result of the smooth animations, but it wasn't to the point where they hindered my enjoyment of the game, I managed to get used to it.
A few words on the game's ending:
I didn't really like it too much. You basically get the choice between two endings. The choice is more or less presented to you as a choice between a more negative and a more positive ending. However, in practice, one ending turns out to be quite the "nothing" ending with seemingly no point whatsoever, and the other ending turns out to be quite sad. The game doesn't really seem to have a good ending, and I think that's a bummer, because in my opinion it definitely should have. It's just not a game that I think should have ended on such a negative note.
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Started playing
Ori and the Will of the Wips. Metroidvanias are probably my absolute favorite genre of games, and this is just another really great one. I'm amazed by how great the game looks on Switch, all while still running at 60 FPS. Not much else to say here, but I'm really enjoying the game. Give it a try if you like Metroidvanias.
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Yesterday I started playing
Vitamin Connection with my girlfriend. It's a really fun multiplayer game! Basically, both of you control the same vitamin capsule, with one player controlling its position and the other player controlling its rotation. There's also a laser beam, where one player controls the trigger and the other player controls the aim. Basically, it's a game about coordination and trying to understand one another blindly. It's really silly, and it's really fun. All while having some great vibes and featuring a nice cartoony art style and a funky Japanese soundtrack. These tracks will immediately get stuck in your head.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!