Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Age of Calamity: Playable Divine Beasts

 
 
Well, since they seemed to be done with the "Untold Chronicles From 100 Years Past" trailers, I expected some different news for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity this week. I was hoping for a dedicated Direct for the game, but we're getting a playable demo instead, which is pretty awesome. More on that once I've played it...

But Age of Calamity also got featured in Nintendo's last "Partner Showcase" for the year, which introduced us to four more playable characters at once:

  • Divine Beast Vah Ruta
  • Divine Beast Vah Rudania
  • Divine Beast Vah Medoh
  • Divine Beast Vah Naboris

Yes, that's what we were hoping for! Not a playable King Rhoam, no Robbie or Purah, certainly not Hestu or Master Kohga... The Divine Beasts!

Well, this idea had crossed my mind before and I certainly wasn't the only one, since the Divine Beasts were featured quite prominently on the game's cover art, roaming the battlefields. It was a huge possibility, but it gave me awful flashbacks to the "Ganon's Fury" mode from Hyrule Warriors, which I'd rather forget about, so I didn't really give this any second thoughts. And if I receive ridiculous amounts of damage from tiny Bokoblins hitting my feet with wooden swords in this, I will be so mad.

Not going to lie, it looks pretty awesome on first glance, but so did Ganon's Fury. And I hope the implementation will be not as clunky as I'm afraid it will be. If you look more closely, the action sequences of the Divine Beasts are not really on par with the quality of the rest of it. Playing as something this large makes everything else look really weird and not in a good way. It's like you're stomping little rubbish pixel armies.

I assume that the Divine Beasts will only be played in special sequences, where these are most likely classified as weapons for the respective Champions. If they were to count as characters and have actual levels, it would be ridiculous...

But whatever, it does make sense to have them as part of the gameplay and I'm going to have to try this for myself before I judge. Hopefully they will have improved things from Ganon's Fury, because that wasn't much fun.

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