Thursday, November 5, 2020

Age of Calamity: One-Hit Obliterator?

 
If there's one thing I really hated about the Adventure Mode in Hyrule Warriors, then it was any "All attacks are devastating!" or "Don't get hit!" missions, where anything can bring your health down to a quarter heart in a single strike – even if it's just a scratch from one of the 100 Bokoblins around you that usually don't do anything at all. It's simply one of the cheapest and most artificial challenge designs in video game history and frankly not much fun, because you have to play cowardly and cheaply, e.g by abusing the bow.

I wouldn't be all that concerned about the return of such challenges in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, if it weren't for the mediocre DLC of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where the "One-Hit Obliterator" got introduced for a very similar challenge on the Great Plateau. It's here where your flawless journey without any deaths might find a quick end, just because of a single Keese. It's by far the worst part of the entire game and I wouldn't be surprised if Koei Tecmo will happily re-use this weapon for some cheap challenges of their own...

In the least it doesn't seem like there will be any ranks this time around, so getting hit doesn't seem to matter much. This is already a good thing, because being excluded from rewards, just because you took half a heart too much damage was pretty lame, especially in missions where everything hits like a truck. It also made collecting additional Heart Containers for your characters completely pointless, because the damage threshold for the best rank was usually the ten hearts that everyone has at the beginning. (At least in the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS versions, because they've changed the requirements for the ranks significantly in the Definitive Edition, as pointed out by Marandahir in the comments.)

So, maybe they'll handle something like the "One-Hit Obliterator" better as well. If it's just a single mission for Link, I probably wouldn't mind too much.

2 comments:

  1. Switch version of the original game changed the damage threshholds for A ranks so that heart containers actually mean something.

    You can often get by in a don't get hit with a single hit taken and still get that A rank, and likewise you can see yourself lose like 20-30 heart containers before that rank drops.

    This was an incredibly nice gesture on the definitive edition which has made the game a lot more reasonable on my third play through.

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  2. Oh, that's good to know. I've yet to play the Definitive Edition, but this makes it indeed sound nicer for another playthrough.

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