Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Hyrule Warriors: Majora's Mask DLC revealed

Well, the cat is out of the bag and it's not a pretty one:


I was at least hoping that they would give Tingle a new design, if they ever add him, since he's a recurring character much like Impa or Ganondorf. Because his design from Majora's Mask is easily the ugliest and Koei Tecmo is really good at making awesome new designs for the characters. The fighting style looks funny, but the super ugly Tingle completely ruins it.

Also... this will create hate without end. Nintendo let their fans preorder the DLC without announcing the characters up front and most people probably expected Skull Kid. Especially in the US Tingle gets a lot of hate and Aonuma was actually smart enough to tell the team to keep him out in favor of a different character. But with the DLC they let many people pay for something, which they might not even want, so here it's even worse. They should have announced the characters right from the get-go. This would have saved us a lot of useless speculation, hype and frustration. The only good thing is that you can completely ignore the DLC characters, since they are not needed for missions.

I personally wanted to have Fierce Deity Link and Skull Kid battling each other, so I'm not entirely happy that they both ended up as attacks for Young Link:



Young Link seems out of place, since so far they created their own incarnations of the characters and prevented them from meeting their past versions. I would have liked to see the Hyrule Warriors Link turn into Fierce Deity, but instead they decided to use Young Link from Majora's Mask for this job.

I really hope that at least in Focus Spirit you can play as the full Fierce Deity, where you fire sword beams. This actually would even be true to the original character, where the sword beams were limited by magic and could break through boss armor. They would probably be too overpowered in Hyrule Warriors as they were, but by limiting the Fierce Deity to Focus Spirit it kind of makes sense. You also get to see the nice effect, where Link transforms into the Fierce Deity. So, they kind of stay true to the original concept with all that, if it really works with Focus Spirit. If not, it will be simply a disappointing moveset. And still all of that could and should have been done by a two handed moveset for Link. There's no reason for Young Link to be in this game.

The main appeal of Hyrule Warriors is playing characters, which you normally can't play as. And in that sense they really failed with the Majora's Mask DLC. Tingle already got multiple games of his own, where you can play as him, and Young Link is playable in multiple Zelda games. Skull Kid on the other hand didn't get playable in both Smash and Hyrule Warriors... which is really disappointing, since he would have lots of potential.

Well, let's talk about the rest:


I made several predictions for the new costumes in the Majora's Mask Pack and "the Ocarina of Time variants for Sheik and Impa" was probably the lamest one. It's still nice to finally have them for the sake of completion. At the same time, it's kind of sad that we only got recolors for Demise and Skyward Sword Impa.

Tingle should have been a costume (for Volga), instead Skull Kid was the one to be turned into a costume, which is kind of disappointing. It looks like Lana is doing the cosplay, who's probably the best fit with her Deku / Kokiri moveset. But in general there are so many nice possibilities for costumes and Koei Tecmo is usually really big with that, so I'm kind of sad that the majority is just some lazy recolors and that we didn't get any additional costume packs (yet).

The Adventure Map looks like it really is using a reset mechanic, which would be awful, if done wrong. I hope that the difficulty at least will be moderate again to compensate for the pressure. But it certainly won't take away the Heart Pieces or costume, but I guess the map will just get covered again, if you fail or so.

It seems that there are no red zones and also less costumes + 8-Bit weapons than in previous maps. I count 13 costumes and five weapons, so at least one of the original weapons is not getting an 8-Bit version (probably the Portal, since the Recorder as the Baton is just too perfect) and three characters are not getting costumes this time. This or there's like a small Moon map, which only contains red fields and the rest of the rewards. This could work also.

However, on the first field it shows only a Heart Piece for Darunia. Which probably means that each character is only getting two additional hearts again for a total of 42. Either they raise the level cap yet again or the remaining hearts will be gotten in future DLC.

Also... no sign of any new stage yet. Clocktown would have been a must.

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