Current Progress
- Difficulty: Very Hard
- Chapter: 7 (Completed)
- Battles: 20 / 20
- Challenges: 161 / 161
- Quests: 376 / 376
- Contribution Rate: 100%
- Map Completion: 100%
Done. Finito. 100%. After two months of playing this game on "Very Hard", I've finally cleared all Challenges and Quests, which earned me the Hyrule Warriors outfit for Link as the last unlockable item:
This really takes me back, where my plan is to actually play Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition afterwards, at least as long as there is no DLC for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. But once there is some, I will be prepared...
It's been a while since my previous post and this is mostly because I didn't play as much, where I was busy with some other hobbies and my motivation was quite low for a time. Well, playing the game on the hardest difficulty from start to finish was quite exhausting, so I simply needed a pause. And after unlocking all the characters, I was solely focused on grinding to level up all the characters and build better weapons, which isn't the most engaging task.
The Final Challenge(r)s
I was saving the last open Challenges, so I would have at least one goal left. But curiously you don't actually need all Ethereal Stones to clear all the Quests, where there's one leftover. So, I was trying the Challenges from time to time to see which ones could be already done and then to save the worst one for last. As a reminder, these were the last Challenges in the game:
- The Fiercest of Foes (Lv. 76)
- The Heart of the Calamity (Lv. 77)
- The Siege of Fort Hateno (Lv. 78)
- Unnatural Disaster (Lv. 80)
Curiously, I did all of these in the opposite order. The one with the highest recommended level, "Unnatural Disaster", turned out to be the easiest of the bunch and I cleared this Challenge early on. It puts you against all five Malice bosses one after another with a time limit, but since you can just fight them 1on1 and there is a lot of grass around for some Fire Rod boosts, it's not really that difficult.
From what I've heard it's also a really good mission to grind weapons with the best possible base attack, where I've also had a lot of luck with "The Siege of Fort Hateno". It's really a mix of having a high recommended level and many bosses.
"The Siege of Fort Hateno" is actually quite a special Challenge, where it's as lengthy as any of the later story scenarios. I would even say that this probably should have switched places with "Unnatural Disaster", because it feels like this was truly supposed to be the final mission in the game.
It gives you this you this feeling of a major threat by the Guardians, probably what "Each Step Like Thunder" should have been. This Challenge also has an interesting mechanic, which is completely unique in the game. While there is a ten minute time limit, the timer only counts down whenever a Guardian is inside Fort Hateno.
So, if you strategically take down all the Guardians out one by one, you're at no risk at losing against the clock here. The trickiest part of this Challenge might be the many Guardian Scouts, especially in the outposts where Astor and Harbinger Ganon retreat to, where it's best to have one or two Special Attacks ready... But with all of this in mind, it was another Challenge that I could beat on my first try.
The next one, "The Heart of the Calamity", on the other hand required some actual preparations. In this Challenge you will have to face all six versions of Ganon one after another: Windblight Ganon, Fireblight Ganon, Waterblight Ganon, Thunderblight Ganon, Harbinger Ganon, and finally Calamity Ganon.
You don't get to use any items and there won't be any apples around either, plus there is a time limit. It could be worse, however, because the time limit of 25 minutes is actually very generous and it doesn't make you fight all six Ganons all at once – instead it's 1on1s again. So, it's just a matter of defeating each Ganon quickly enough.
I've chosen Daruk for this Challenge, because you can always stay close to the bosses and immediately retaliate whenever they use their big and slow areal attacks. You can just shield and stay safe within their vicinity. The only exception to this is Waterblight Ganon, where the huge ice blasts will still hurt you, much like the large Lynel blasts. But otherwise you are completely safe while shielding with Daruk's Protection, so the lack of healing items and the time limit doesn't seem like a problem.
Still, when I tried the mission for the first time I couldn't do it in time... Daruk was simply too weak and all the Blights took way too long to defeat. So, I had to do my best Rocky montage with the Goron to level him up and build a good weapon with him. It was even my first weapon in the game with the highest possible attack value for that weapon type. But more on that later...
And once Daruk reached the peak of his potential, this Challenge became almost too easy, where I still had half of the time left when Calamity Ganon fell. So, I overdid things here, but it's fine and this finally scored me the Hyrule Warriors outfit for Link. I've cleared this Challenge on January 21st, exactly two months after the game came out, so this felt like a good timing.
But there was one more Challenge left after all this: "The Fiercest of Foes". Here you have lots of Lynels and Lizalfos with a strict time limit. Out of the final Challenges I've tried this one first and despite bringing all my best warriors at the time it wasn't enough. And even when I returned here with some Level 90+ characters and Level 30 weapons with the highest possible attack value, the mission was still quite tough and far from easy, despite being massively over-leveled.
There is another double Malice Lynel fight waiting for you in this Challenge and this time you can't separate them as easily as at the Temple of Time. In addition, the many Lizalfos are all set to sniper mode and therefore are constantly shooting at you from all sides, which is super annoying and can cause insane amounts of damage very quickly. And there are a lot of them all around the Lynels, not making this easy, because when you try to take the Lizalfos out, the Lynel(s) will most likely hit you.
Well, it's best to save the double Malice Lynel for last and try to get as many Special Attacks ready with all your characters as you can. When you've defeated one of the single Lynels, you want to hit some more Lizalfos for the Special meter and then send the respective character up to the Malice Lynels, so they will already do some damage. But be careful and ready to immediately trigger your Special Attack, should you swap to one of those characters, because you'll end up in hell.
My characters of choice here were Daruk for the shield, which will help a lot with the Lizalfos and the Malice Lynels, as well as Mipha for the healing Special Attack, which can be a lifesaver at the end. Revali with his arrow spam was also a good choice, because you can take out the surrounding Lizalfos a lot more easily with him. And I also brought Link, simply because he was my first character on Level 100 and he's generally quite good against Lynels.
Weapon Building
All Chapters cleared, all Quests cleared, all Challenges cleared... Is that the end of the game? Is there nothing left to do? Well, actually, if you're the type of gal or guy who enjoys some good grinding, then you could say that the game has just started. Not only can you level every character to 100, you can also build good or even "perfect" weapons for them, where having a high damage weapon does you a lot more favors than the levels. But do you really want to do all that?
To grind, or not to grind, that is the question.
Well, as of now, I've focused on only a few characters: Link, Zelda, Daruk, Mipha, Revali, and Terrako. I could continue with everyone else, but I'm on the fence here, as long as there no DLC announced. If the game were to get some sort of "Master Mode" as a continuation of your current save file, then it would be really worth the effort.
But I've spent a lot of time with building "perfect" weapons in Hyrule Warriors on both the Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS and by the time I was done with most of it, I didn't really have any use for them, because there was nothing else left to do. So, I'm not too motivated to go forward right now, since it could all just be for naught...
At least the effort doesn't seem to be as bad, because you don't have any sealed skills, where you need to get thousands and thousands of K.O.s with multiple weapons to unlock it all... Putting together a good weapon in Age of Calamity is not as costly and time consuming as it used to be in the first Hyrule Warriors, which is a good thing.
But you still have the luck factor of finding the right weapons, which have the seals that you want to use. In addition, the base attack value is also random and there is no way of increasing it in the Blacksmith, so you have to be lucky with that as well. Playing any scenarios with a recommended level from 71 to 80 will increase the chances significantly, however. For most weapons the maximum is 70, but you can get above this via rusty weapons that you can find for certain characters.
As for finding "++" seals, any of Blood Moon scenarios will be favorable here, so I'm spending most of my time replaying the story missions and chilling under the red sky. Even with the increased level recommendations, the different Chapters are still much easier to play through than they were the first time, mostly thanks to the better weapons.
If there's no Blood Moon, you can just quickly play "Mysterious Arrivals" as Master Sword Link, which will take less than a minute. It's even the reason, why he ended up as my first Level 100 character, followed by Daruk because of all his training.
If you bring a weapon to Level 25 and 30, it will unlock two hidden seals. These cannot be removed or transferred and are predetermined for each weapon. The first ones I encountered were on the Master Sword and Mipha's Trident, where the Level 25 seals curiously were the exact ones I already had on the weapons: "Damage at Full Hearts++" and "Special-Attack Charge Rate++". Their values are a little bit better, though not by much.
There are also completely new seals that you can't get otherwise, like "Heal a Percentage of Damage Dealt" on the Master Sword. There is even a seal that lets you "Detect Nearby Koroks" with certain weapons, like the Forest Dweller Sword, the Shaka Maracas, or the Ancient Overclock Unit, where there is some irony to this. When I've learned that this ability even exists, I had already found all Koroks...
I wouldn't even have invested that much in any weaker weapons to begin with, where only the Sheikah Slate was on my upgrade list. And again there is some irony to this, because the Sheikah Slate couldn't detect Koroks in Breath of the Wild. You needed the Korok Mask for this...
Originally, I was going to find all of this stuff out by myself, but I quickly had to realize that this is just way too much and it was time to tap into the hive mind of the internet. The people on GameFAQs have compiled a very useful spreadsheet that contains everything you could possibly know about the weapons in Age of Calamity: best base attack values, all (hidden) seals, and so on.
And this helps me with planning, because it's good to know the secret skills of the weapons in advance. For the the best damage bonus of 20 you want four seals of the same shape and then two other seals of a different shape. Six seals of the same shape sadly won't do the trick, but since having six seals of the same shape is rarely ever useful, this isn't much of a problem.
Well, here is my first weapon that has reached the maximum damage output, a Boulder Breaker for Daruk:
It's not the best build ever, far from it. The idea was to go for full heart damage, since he won't take damage that often and can also heal himself with the last seal. And then there's a K.O. bonus on top, where this best utilized in a mission with lots of small foes. In the end you might even want different builds for the same weapons, e.g. one focused on looting with the circle shaped skills.
However, the general consensus seems to be that you want to go with "Attack Speed++" whenever possible and make that three or four times to get what "Hasty Attacks" would do for you in Hyrule Warriors with a single weapon skill slot. And I can't really argue against this, because faster weapons will do more damage naturally and also make it easier to break weak point gauges in time.
But there are certain characters where the increased attack speed might break their movesets and I personally find the focus on Attack Speed to be very boring. So, I'll probably only use it on weapons that I find somewhat too slow, like Zelda's.
Very Hard Conclusion
This ends this blog series for now. And it's been quite the ride, where I'm even getting a little bit sentimental when returning to the early parts of the game. It's been that long.
In fact I've spent over 170 hours on the game already, which is a lot and shows how much of a difference the "Very Hard" difficulty can create here. Each major enemy will take three or even four times as long to be defeated, you will to face several defeats yourself (mainly because of the time limits) and there will potentially be some grinding, even if it's just to refill your items regularly. In comparison, the playthrough on "Normal", which I had joined for some co-op play, took about 60 hours for 100% completion and basically no grinding at all.
To be honest, I had to realize that I was going full "try-hard" with this, where the experience was equally frustrating as it was satisfying. But I don't regret it, because I feel like the challenge made the game better and more interesting overall, while it also gave an excuse to invest more time into building characters and such things. And it's not a true game if you can't lose somehow.
The "Very Hard" difficulty also works quite well with this game,
where the focus is a lot more on fighting bosses than handling multiple emergency situations all at once, like it used to be the case in the first Hyrule Warriors. Having a crazy difficulty level wasn't enjoyable at
all in that game, where the Twilight Princess Adventure Map on the Wii U was the best
example. And there are no A/S ranks either, so there is no penalty for taking
damage other than the damage taken and the difficulty only really clashes with the many time limits.
But the most frustrations probably came from the fact that it was taking me quite long to complete Age of Calamity, where I was out of the loop for quite a while. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, because I got a lot more out of the game because of this. And in the end all that counts is that I did it, where the battle records don't have a single entry on the three lower difficulties anywhere in my game and I'm proud of that.
There's also the hope that this blog series has been a little bit more entertaining for it, because I wasn't just quickly checking off all the boxes. And this is where I want to thank you, the readers, for sticking with me for so long (and not throwing any spoilers into the comments). Thank you!
Here's hoping that this journey will continue in 2021 with some DLC. But with the 35th Anniversary of Zelda happening this year and all the missing armor items from Breath of the Wild (which would be perfect for the anniversary, because most of them are based on other Zelda games), I'm certain that this won't be the last of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. Until then!
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