Hyrule Warriors: 30th Anniversary DLC Character?

Look at the current roster of Hyrule Warriors - Legends...

With such a blatant gap in the character select menu, you ought to ask, whether they might have planned a 30th character for the game. It's the 30th Anniversary of The Legend of Zelda after all and receiving one final character would certainly be a nice gift. This idea isn't new, in fact I've dealt with it on Hyrule Blog several times already (for example here).

However, I personally thought that this character would be Hilda, because so far every DLC character, both free and paid, has been integrated into the DLC Adventure Mode Maps of Legends. They get their higher weapon tiers there, as well as 15 collectible Heart Containers. This is much better than on the Wii U, where save for Cia, Volga and Wizzro all DLC characters stayed autonomous with nothing to do and their tier 2 and 3 weapons unlocked already. They could add one more character to Legends that works the same way, but he or she would break all current patterns and then give you a tier 4 weapon right from the start...

For a full new character it would need another Adventure Mode Map, but update 1.6.0 already added a medal for receiving all other medals, which is a big indicator that they don't plan to add any more Adventure Mode Maps or anything bigger at all. I had this vision, where they could have used the Level 9 dungeon from The Legend of Zelda as a finale map, but that seems off the table for now. And retroactively adding the characters' goodies on older Adventure Maps might be too much of an override. It's still possible that we're getting an autonomous character, but chances are slim.

And to be totally honest, I wouldn't even know, who would make a good candidate at this point. There are plenty of characters left, but most of them are either best saved for a sequel or should have been paired with any of the previous DLC offerings. Toon Ganondorf, Makar, Linebeck, Byrne, Hilda... All of them have potential, but if Koei Tecmo had them planned, we already would have gotten them with the corresponding DLC packs. After all Medli was released for free alongside the Master Wind Waker Pack and not just now. If they had Toon Ganondorf or Makar planned, they could have turned the Master Wind Waker Pack into a full DLC pack with two new characters. So, I doubt that we will see them now. Same goes for Linebeck, Byrne or Hilda, who could have accompanied the DLC featuring their games.

Groose has been requested quite often by fans, which even was acknowledged by Koei Tecmo (which is a big deal, they did the same for Yuga and Linkle), but he would be completely loose at this point. Groose is such an obvious choice, because he left an apparent gap inside the story mode, where Skyward Sword was the only era to not feature two heroes. And even his weaponry is part of the story campaign, so all it ever needed is Groose to be part of the Sealed Grounds scenario as well. But that's best done in a sequel, where they can change the story accordingly or come up with an entire new story.

Another request that I see often is Vaati from The Minish Cap, but according to producer Yosuke Hayashi at the Wondercon earlier this year this would be "difficult". There was no further elaboration on that, but right now we have to assume that all the Capcom Zelda games are off-limits.

One of my favorite picks outside the Capcom games would be Nabooru, but again she's someone, who's best delivered in a sequel together with a Gerudo Fortress / Desert Colossus stage and Twinrova as her personal opponent. That would be great and right now she would feel rather out of place and meaningless.

And there lies the problem... If this is really supposed to be a 30th Anniversary gift, then it should be something meaningful and not just some side character from a game that already has been featured. Agahnim from A Link to the Past could make a great classic character, but his role is too similar to Yuga's, where adding him right after Yuga would be somewhat uninteresting. On GameFAQs I see people often suggest the Old Man from The Legend of Zelda as a "joke character", where all his quotes are from the original game, like "Master using this and you can have it". But I'm not sure about getting such a faceless character just for the laughs. The old man got more defined in later games with characters such as Saharahla or Oshus, where you might even find a good weapon type to go with them (Oshus could use his cane).

There's also the Old Man in Breath of the Wild, who probably has a more important role, and it's slightly possible that they might try to promote the game with a new character in Hyrule Warriors. It wouldn't be the Link from the game, because that could just be realized as a costume for Link and maybe a Sheikah Slate weapon type (which could finally give him an actual Darkness weapon). In the very least I could imagine them doing the costume, but any of it will have to wait until the actual game was released. And at this point Koei Tecmo might be already working on a sequel for Nintendo Switch, where Breath of the Wild certainly will be a great base for new content. So, I doubt that they would do anything beyond a costume.

With that I'm at an impasse. A new character might not integrate well into Legends without any new Adventure Mode Maps and there doesn't even seem to be any real candidates at this point. So, it's best to get used to that gap in the lower right corner, because it might never be filled.

But at least we can still expect some smaller goodies like costumes or additional fairy contents, where I made a post about potential future updates here.

Update: There's also the possibility that there's going to be a collaboration character from another Nintendo franchise, e.g. Samus. In that case it would even make sense for the final character to be separated from the rest of the game. See this further post for more thoughts about this idea.