For the price of $19.99 / 19.99€ you can currently expand your experience of Breath of the Wild with two DLC Packs: The Master Trials and The Champions' Ballad. The packs can't be purchased individually for unknown reasons. Maybe most people bought the similar DLC bundles in case of Hyrule Warriors and Mario Kart 8 anyway, so Nintendo saved themselves the trouble of selling the packs separately this time. But it's certainly disappointing for people, who might only want to have a part of the DLC, like a certain armor piece. Then they still have to go all in. In any case, both packs have been released by now and we can finally evaluate the DLC contents as a whole.
Breath of the Wild is actually the first main Zelda game that offers purchasable contents, yet the series still was no stranger to add-ons. Two years ago Tri Force Heroes received a free downloadable update with two new outfits and the Den of Trials, a multi-floor survival dungeon similar to the Savage Labyrinth or the Cave of Ordeals in past Zelda games. Shorty after, Twilight Princess HD added a similar dungeon to the game with the Cave of Shadows, as well as the Hero Mode difficulty and a Miiverse Stamp collectible quest. And adding content to the various Zelda remasters goes all the way back to 1998 with Link's Awakening DX, where they added the Color Dungeon and a new photo side quest that led to some new story moments.
The Expansion Pass of Breath of the Wild doesn't really re-invent the wheel here. It simply sells the same type of add-on contents that the series saw before: there are new armor pieces, a trial cave, new shrines, a way to re-battle bosses, a new dungeon and a new difficulty mode. There are also some new memories to view and a couple new challenges that lead to the shrines. What you shouldn't expect from the DLC are new areas to explore. Instead it adds more to existing areas in the game, making them feel less empty at times.
New Armor
The DLC adds a total of 18 new armor pieces to the game. This includes five new hats/masks, a new shirt and four complete sets of armor:
- Korok Mask
- Majora's Mask
- Midna's Helmet
- Zant's Helmet
- Ravio's Hood
- Island Lobster Shirt
- Tingle Set
- Phantom Armor Set
- Phantom Ganon Set
- Royal Guard Set
With two or three exceptions, these new armor pieces don't provide any new abilities or bonuses. Instead they simply copy existing ones, e.g. the Tingle Set works exactly like the Dark Link Set, which is funny. You also can't enhance any of them, so later in the game they are only there for the looks, because they won't provide the necessary defense. On the other hand, some of these items seem overpowered for how early you can find them in the game. Majora's Mask specifically combines the effects of all monster masks, making those completely obsolete, while you can find it right away after leaving the Great Plateau... And this doesn't seem like it was really thought through by Nintendo.
(On top of things, there isn't even enough space in the Armor Inventory to collect all the pieces anyway, so you have to sell some of it to make space. It feels like an oversight from Nintendo, which hopefully will get fixed in future updates.)
The way they added the armor to the game also wasn't really thoughtful. You simply get spammed with a series of new "EX" side quests that appear in your Adventure Log out of nowhere and that lead you to journals in various places. These journals then provide the locations, where you can find the treasure chests with the armor. If Nintendo wanted to be any lazier, they could have just dropped all those chests right in front of you after starting the game... Breath of the Wild didn't have many outstanding side quests to begin with, but the whole armor hunt even lowered the bar. It's the most lackluster feature of the DLC.
In the very least the new armor pieces all look very nice and add quite a high amount of fan service to the game with various costumes from past Zelda games.
Quality of Life for a Price
Probably the most interesting and useful new armor piece is the Korok Mask, which starts to react to nearby Koroks. The radius is quite limited, but it's still your best chance of finding all the Koroks in the game without the help of a guide. And it probably was an often requested feature before the DLC, which raises the question why this became DLC to begin with, instead of a feature in a free update.
It's similar with other additions in the DLC. The Hero's Path Mode lets you follow around the last 200 hours of movement on your map, which is certainly a useful feature for discovering areas, where something still might be hidden. Nintendo planned this feature from the beginning, where your movements got even recorded before the DLC was released, but you have to buy the DLC to actually see the data.
In addition there are the Travel Medaillon, which lets you set a personal teleport point on the overworld, and the Ancient Bridle and Ancient Saddle, where the latter lets you teleport your horse to your current location, so that you can finally summon it whenever you want, much like you could with Epona in past games. Other than the fact that the rest of the horse gear basically became obsolete, these are all comfort features to improve the game for everyone, where you shouldn't have to pay for them. All of this could and should have been included in free updates, instead of being hidden behind a pay wall.
Trial of the Sword
As part of "The Master Trials", the DLC added floor-based survival dungeon to the game, where you have to defeat all enemies to proceed to the next floor. These have been featured in several Zelda games of the past, where the most prominent examples would be the Savage Labyrinth in the Wind Waker and the Cave of Ordeals in Twilight Princess. The "Trial of the Sword", however, is closer to the Den of Trials in Tri Force Heroes, where each floor has an individual layout and where the whole trial was divided in individual sections.
There are the Beginning, Middle and Final Trials with a total of 12, 16 and 23 floors respectively (including resting points). You can play all three parts individually without starting over from the beginning, which makes the whole thing much more bearable. The three trials themselves also have individual sections based on the various areas and themes in the game. For example you start the Beginning Trials in a forest area, but the second half places you in rooms full of water. Various assets from the overworld have been use to build these rooms, which creates a unique look in the game thanks to the shrine visuals, where you normally wouldn't find things like Bokoblin camps or even trees.
The trials can be entered by pushing the Master Sword back into its pedestal, which transports you into some sort of spiritual realm. It's a nice throwback to Skyward Sword, but it also prevents you from bringing any gear into the trials, where you start only with your hearts, stamina, Sheikah Slate and the Paraglider available. The rest of the inventory is empty and the Champion abilities are disabled as well, so it really limits you to what the trials give you. It's similar to the survival trial of Eventide Island, where you have to work with what the island provides you with (unless you drop stuff before the trial). So, if you like this type of situation, you're in for a ride.
On the one hand this restriction is exciting and understandable, because otherwise you could just cheat through everything with Ancient Arrows (though the Final Trial sort of lets you do that), while the Champion abilities might just slow you down, because you want them to recharge first. On the other hand it diminishes most of your achievements throughout the game. Why would you even bother with collecting the best weapons and gear, if there's no challenge, where you can really use them? A trial cave like this would have been the perfect opportunity to let the players go all out.
Curiously, with the limitations present, the Beginning Trials appear to be the hardest of the three, where in a water area you have to face some stronger Lizalfos with only very limited gear, which in the new Master Mode is one of the toughest challenges in the game, unless you trick the AI somehow. The later trials let you find more gear and helpful items to prevail on all the floors.
For your troubles you will be able to increase the Master Sword's strength with each trial up to the point, where it's constantly in its glowing state. And that's certainly a useful reward. However, if you're able to get the through the entire Trial of the Sword, it doesn't seem like you need such an upgrade to begin with.
Master Mode
When the first The Legend of Zelda game offered a second difficulty, it completely changed all of its dungeons in the so called "2nd Quest". Ocarina of Time also received a "Master Quest" variant, where the dungeons have been altered in interesting ways. But ever since Skyward Sword, if Zelda players wanted a more challenging playthrough, they had to settle for the simple "Hero Mode" variant, where only the received damage got increased and where you might not find any hearts, besides other small changes. But there were no big alterations anymore.
The "Master Mode" of Breath of the Wild is somewhere in between. It doesn't touch its dungeons, so the Divine Beasts and Sheikah Shrines stay mostly the same, but it adds more enemies in certain locations, which might also lead to some interesting surprises.
The core feature of the Master Mode, however, is that all enemies have moved up one tier. So, all the red Bokoblins now became blue ones and so on. They did leave single specimens of the lowest tier enemies for you to find, so you can still take pictures for Hyrule Compendium. But overall everything has moved up in rank, where the Master Mode even introduces new golden enemies that didn't exist in Normal Mode. But their main difference is that they simply have more health than their silver counterparts. Health can be a deciding factor, however, because all enemies now regenerate. This adds a sense of urgency to all battles, where some of the bosses, which are able to evade you for a time, even provide a tough challenge.
Probably the biggest addition to Master Mode are the floating platforms everywhere, which might transport enemies or additional treasure chests. The chests often provide you with better weapons, so that dealing with all the upgraded enemies isn't completely unbalanced. But the platforms themselves are probably the most interesting part, because they add a layer of aerial exploration to the game, which wasn't there before.
Master Mode lets you start over, but it does come with its own save slots (one auto and one manual save), where you can switch between your Normal Mode and Master Mode saves at any time.
(As a side note, there's a technical issue, where Normal Mode and Master Mode share the same files for personal pictures in Hyrule Compendium. So, if you take a picture in any mode, it will be overwritten in the other, unless you're using the purchasable stock pictures. Playing Master Mode on a different profile prevents this issue, however.)
The Champions' Ballad
This is more or less the core part of the Expansion that came with the second DLC Pack of the same name. It adds a series of new main quests to the game that are accessible after you've beaten all four Divine Beasts. You're then invited back to the Great Plateau, where it all started.
There you are greeted by the One-Hit Obliterator Trial, where you carry a weapon that defeats all foes in a single hit, but you're also reduced to a quarter heart, which means that every little scratch will kill you as well. Anyone, who has played the "Don't get hit!" missions in Hyrule Warriors should be already familiar with this type of gameplay. You're confined to the one melee weapon, but you can use everything else in your inventory, where you might heavily rely on bows and playing it safe from the distance. You have to clear four enemy camps that lead to new shrines, where one of them stands out in this scenario with a long series of now very deadly spiked traps.
This can be fun, but for the most part it feels like more like a turn-off that gets in the way for the more enjoyable part of the DLC. So, it probably would have been a good idea to keep it separate. As a reward you get enough Spirit Orbs for another Heart Container or Stamina Vessel (you still can't maximize both, however, even with the DLC) and it creates obelisks near the Divine Beasts that show you locations of three additional trials per Champion. It's a big scavenger hunt all over the areas and probably the most guided part of the game, but you can still do all the trials in any order.
The individual Trials of the Champions have you chase through blue light rings at a fast pace, fight new enemies on the overworld (which includes two new variants of existing overworld bosses) or pass other smaller tests. Each of them lead to an additional Shrine, where all shrines in the DLC feature completely new puzzles and trials, so there are no normal "Tests of Strength" or any "Blessings", which filled up the shrine count in the main game.
Some of the new shrines turn out rather simple, if you already have full protection against flames or electricity. Others provide more complex puzzles, where especially the Mah Eliya Shrine as part of Mipha's Trials has spawned lots of different videos with creative solutions all over the Internet. These 12 new shrines don't reward you with the usual Spirit Orbs, however, but with Emblems of the Champions.
These Emblems can be traded at the Divine Beasts to re-enter them in so called Realms of Memories. These let you battle the bosses of the Divine Beasts again in obscured visions, which feels similar to the boss encounters in Ganon's Tower of the Wind Waker. You also get pre-defined inventories, which again tries to create some sort of challenge by stripping you of all your (overpowered) stuff. But only one of the bosses offers a real challenge due to the inventory limitations, especially in Master Mode. Afterwards you can also chose to re-battle the bosses anytime you wish, which is certainly nice to have.
As a reward the corresponding Champion abilities recharge now three times faster, which is of similar value to the upgraded Master Sword. You will also receive new Memories of how Princess Zelda recruited the Champions, which adds some beautiful moments to the overall story.
A New Dungeon
If you're done with all the trials, the game invites you to the Final Trial, the new dungeon of the DLC. It's essentially another Divine Beast, which combines elements of all the four other Divine Beasts. It's again similar to Ganon's Tower in the Wind Waker, where you have a central room with a big door that opens after you've cleared the four individual rooms. Such a final dungeon, where the rooms are based on the individual dungeons of the game, can be even considered as a staple in the series, where for example Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask or Skyward Sword did this as well. It's nice that Breath of the Wild now received something similar, but you also shouldn't expect too much here, because they kept things rather short and simple.
The ability to alter the dungeon at any time, in this case the direction of gears that would effect all the rooms, felt special as usual. The visuals of the dungeon, however, are pretty much the same as in the others.
At least the boss of the dungeon is a nice surprise and certainly one of the absolute highlights of the DLC. And Nintendo also thought of the option to fight this boss again at any time, if you want.
The Master Cycle Returns
As a reward for the first victory you receive the Master Cycle Zero, which is certainly the most fun addition to this game. You can summon it almost everywhere (major exceptions being Death Mountain and the desert) via a new Sheikah Slate Rune, you have full control over it and you can even make small jumps, where the bike lets you climb steep hills in ways that wouldn't have been possible with horses. Horses may still have other advantages like speed or autonomy, but overall the Master Cycle Zero completely outclasses them, where its only downside is that you need to refuel it every so often. But at least that way you have a new use for the many materials that you keep collecting throughout the game.
Essentially making its way into Zelda over from Mario Kart 8, the Master Cycle Zero does feel "out of place" at first. But it still fits the theme of Sheikah Technology in the game and it's so much fun to travel the vast lands of Hyrule with this new mount that you quickly get used to its presence in the game.
New Old Things
What's noteworthy about the DLC is that other than the new armor pieces and the Master Cycle Zero there aren't really any new assets in this package. Most of it simply recycles and remixes things that already have been in the game. So, you shouldn't expect any new visual themes for dungeons for example, it's just more of the old stuff, even though here and there it creates some interesting combinations. The new enemies are mostly just reskins and resizes of existing foes as well.
While the new boss looks completely new, even there they managed to cleverly combine existing models and animations to create something different. It's probably the pinnacle of what you can achieve by reusing assets, but at least there new music pieces around the Champions' Ballad, which include tracks for the new dungeon and boss and which are pretty amazing.
Nintendo is known for keeping things compact in size and maybe that's the reason they did this, but it's clear that the DLC didn't get the full attention of the entire development team. They are probably keeping the good stuff for a sequel, but it's still a shame that they couldn't put a little more effort into the DLC to go the extra mile with Breath of the Wild, a game that certainly would deserve the care and attention
Final Thoughts
Overall Nintendo played it safe by relying on the typical types of add-on contents that the series has seen before, like new outfits, a new difficulty mode, a trial cave dungeon or re-battling bosses. All of this works very well as DLC, but because most of these features had been part of the whole package in past Zelda releases, fans might feel cheated out of something that the game should have per default.
It's especially troublesome with additions that serve as basic improvements for the game, like the ability to call your horse from everywhere or some indicator for hidden Koroks. In that case Nintendo crossed a line, where they should have provided these features via free updates, instead of paid DLC.
Also, the integration of the new armor has been sloppy at best and most of the DLC simply recycles existing assets, where it feels like the majority of the development team already left, when they started working on the DLC. It feels like Nintendo didn't really care about the DLC, which is a shame.
A common theme in all of the DLC are trials, where the game either takes away all your hearts, your abilities or parts of your inventory to create an artificial challenge. It doesn't try to create a challenge for those, who have enhanced all their armor, collected very good gear and alike, where there's seemingly no real endgame challenge other than taking on the new golden enemies in Master Mode. And in that sense the DLC is absolutely lacking.
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