Review #616: Hyrule Warriors Legends

 A legendary example in how not to make a Warriors game.

 Nearly 3 years ago I started Hyrule Warriors Legends full of hopes and reams. At the time, comments ran amok about how poorly it ran on the vanilla 3DS. I tried the game for a few minutes and told my friends 'Hey! It's not as bad as they say!'. Three years later, I still stand by my words, it's not that bad. It's worse.

 The game follows an uninteresting plot about a girl that wants to destroy Hyrule, so Link, Zelda and Impa team up with another newcomer waifu to defeat her. Along the way they'll travel to different dimensions, meeting different allies from The Legend of Zelda, Darunia, Ruto or even Agatha, the bug collector. The story is dumb and boring, with tons of text but no voice acting, making it a chore to go through. I don't mind the lack of voices, but if they wanted to stay THAT true to the series, at the time anyways, they should've made the script more concise and digestible. As you beat stages in this mode you'll be able to play them as any character in the game's Free Mode. There's a new mode, Adventure, in which you travel through a grid made up of various different type of Battles, such as defeating the correct enemies. Adventure hides a lot of rewards, but it has this obnoxious system in which you collect item cards and then must use them on the right tile in order to earn the right to earn the rewards. Dumb and needlessly convoluted... which pretty much describes the entire game.

 The game plays like any other Musou/Warriors game but worse. Y is your weak comboable attack and you can end that attack string with X for a stronger attack. A does super moves and B jumps, L is used to guard. You know, the usual. But this game wanted to be unique, so it introduced 'Tools', like the Boomerang, the Bow, the Bombs and any characters can use them. Did I say can? I meant must. Generals in this game are incredibly sturdy unless you are way above their level, to take them out quickly you have to wait for them to expose their weak points and then hit them, once you 'break' the weak point gauge you'll use a finisher that deals a lot of damage. Problem? Waiting is a chore, and in some cases you'll have to PAUSE the game and use the correct tool. It's so dumb. I want to smash thousands of enemies, and having to pause to switch my tool is so dumb. But at least you can chip away at their health bars.... Something you can't do with bosses. King Dodongo, Gomma and a few other Giant Bosses are here, and they are a chore to take out. You must wait for them to expose their weak points and then use the correct tool to fell them so that you can hit them for a short while and, hopefully, use your finisher. Bosses are dumb. One time I picked up the game after a while and I had completely forgotten what tool I had to use for Gohma, so I went one by one. It was so dumb, and having to pause to switch tools breaks the immersion. Having to choose between chipping an enemy's health away or circle them aimlessly waiting for them to expose their weak point is so stupid. This is a Warriors game, a fun and frenetic action game in which I can go on a power trip and demolish mobs and this game fails at achieving that.

 There are other mechanics that I found completely and utterly dumbfounding. Heart container and pieces must be collected by finding them on maps in order to increase your characters' life bars. Mind you, your life gauge does increase as you level up, but there are 10 heart containers per characters locked behind needless busywork. Having to comb the stage for a suspicious looking rock or what have you is idiotic, particularly because by the end of it you'll have gone over the same maps over and over and over again. In such a repetitive game like Musou/Warriors you have to keep things fast and fresh, this is the opposite of that. Another addition to the game were AI Characters you could swap between, like Fire Emblem does, but these characters have pretty much no AI of their own, so you have to constantly pause the game to direct them to move somewhere else. It's kinda useful, since you can move other characters towards objectives and then swap when necessary, but I wish you could give them some kind of basic AI so that you didn't need to micromanage their movement... like they did with the much superior Fire Emblem Warriors.

 That said, these characters won't be much use if you don't upgrade them, and it's a bit of a hassle. You have to collect materials from fallen generals, but sometimes they take a unnecessarily long time to disappear and drop their material, so you have to wait aimlessly for the drop. It's so much of a chore! It doesn't help that the vanilla 3DS version runs so poorly and it can be tough to find fallen objects when it's full of enemies. Speaking of how it runs, the FPS is butt, but you can get used to it... but the game still has problems showing enemies, so you'll see endless amounts of enemies just spawning out of thin air, heck, sometimes it'll take a while for the Keep's general to appear on the screen, so it means you have yet another instance of aimless waiting. There are Enemy Outposts that you can capture, to stop enemies from spawning, but it feels useless since enemies can recapture these without too many problems.

 There's a new 'Fairy' mechanic, a Fairy that you can customize with clothes and foods and then you can summon her to use an spell on the battlefield, but it feels so unnecessary, I don't know why this thing is in the game, or how it's supposed to add any fun or depth. Why not fix how you lose your locked-on enemy when you use a super? That is something that needed fixing. On the other hand, I can praise how the game offers various weapon styles on some characters, Link with the Sword and Shield is completely different from the one with the magical rod, or Lana(The newcomer waifu) can either fight with a spellbook  or a lance. On the other hand, and this is personal, I really disliked the character selection. You know you're grasping for straws when Agatha and Tingle make it into the game, but it's not like I can blame Tecmo, The Legend of Zelda doesn't have many 'cool' characters besides Link, Zelda, Impa, Shiek and Ganondorf. That said, people that like playing with Weirdos and Freaks won't take issue with this, and, on the flip side, this is the coolest version of Link ever. Ever.

 While playing the game often times I wondered... would it be better if I played it on a home console? I mean, there has to be a reason so many people consider it to be the best Warriors game. I even thought about buying the Switch Port... but there are design choices, nameless Tools and Bosses, that just don't work well and even a better performance can't fix that. In two words, this game is excessively convoluted. In one word: It's just boring. I just can't understand why people like this game so much but dislike the Musou series... well, maybe I can, this is one of the best examples of how NOT to make a Musou Game, and maybe that's why critics love it so much.

 3.5 out of 10