It is done. 100%. Just in time for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond next week, I have completed the new Hyrule Warriors. Of course, this state won't last long, because we will get a second content update in the near future, but for now I'm finished. Let's talk about the rest of the post-game, as well as the additions that came with the 1.0.2 update two days ago (one day earlier than they had announced).
Difficulty: Very Hard
Scenarios: 24
Challenges: 159
Quests: 402
Map Completion: 100%
Honestly, I didn't expect to make it in time for Metroid Prime 4, not after how long it took me to complete Age of Calamity, which (including its DLCs) lasted about twice as long as Age of Imprisonment, despite having a similar amount of content. Well, I took one week of vacation this month, which certainly helped, but I'm looking at 97 hours playtime now, which is quite a lot, but it's far from 200.
This alone shows the difference in difficulty between the two titles. I've been playing both on Very Hard from start to finish, where Age of Calamity was quite the torment at times. Age of Imprisonment was super tough in its second chapter, but it has been smooth sailing ever since... Until the newest Vicious Battles, that is.
Again, the biggest factor are probably the Sync Strikes and Zonai Devices. They let you crack the weak point gauges so much faster and more often than you could ever dream of in Age of Calamity. The overall damage you take also seems to be lower. And it certainly sped things up significantly that you don't have to replay the same Challenge(s) over and over again to refill your rods and apples. This alone may already account for 50% of the time difference.
The difference also shows when you're asking for two Lynels to show up at once, which was a nightmare scenario in Age of Calamity. One Challenge in the post-game, called "Trial: Overcoming Limits", makes you face all tiers of Lynels in a row. There are five in total, where they count the armored version of the Silver Lynel as its own tier. You are given a 15 minute time limit and by the time I got to the White-Maned Lynel I seriously hoped that the last two Silver Lynels at the end would just appear at once, because time was getting short... And luckily they did.
It's simply faster to fight two of them at once, because you can simultaneously target them with Zonai Devices. The game is also so nice to group all your opponents whenever you perform a Sync Strike or a Special Attack, so that all their weak point gauges will receive damage at once. And that helps a lot.
Of course, as I would find out later, there are limits as to how many foes you want to be dealing with at once, especially with some of the stronger ones. For example, right now the game is still considerate enough to not make you fight multiple Archfiends at once. The Challenge with the highest level in the base game (80), "The Archfiend Quartet", still gives each of them their own little space on Hyrule Field with enough road between them.
Maybe you can still lure one into the other, but with a 20 minute time limit you can just take them out comfortably one by one. That's five minutes per Archfiend and just enough. This Challenge is also perfect for when you're still having an Archfiend open in your Aside Quests, which was the case for me with Ardi and the Grimgibo.
The highlight of the late game Challenges, at least prior to the 1.0.2 update, was "A Fated Meeting", however. Here you get a little story where Calamo and the Knight Construct are revisiting the place in the Depths where they first met. And it plays a classic Zelda music medley during the mission, which is awesome, and ends on a fight against Phantom Ganon.
This truly made it feel like you're playing some incarnation of Link here. And the music gave me classic Hyrule Warriors vibes while playing, making this side mission a joy overall. Luckily, the free update has added five new Challenges that are also very enjoyable, for the most part, and all bring something new on the table:
- Eve of the Final Confrontation
- The Stolen Spear
- The Flux Construct Onslaught
- In Search of Poes
- The Struggle for Ash Swamp
The only one I didn't like as much was "The Stolen Spear", because it had some truly tight time limit, which brought back memories from Age of Calamity. But otherwise I was positively surprised about each of these.
"The Stolen Spear" is where you can obtain the High Guard's Spear, by the way, which is a high tier weapon, unlike its claymore and sword counterparts. Those were only mid tier and got outclassed quickly, so it wasn't worthwhile to invest into them. It makes sense for when you are getting these, because this is a level 81 mission, while the High Guard's Sword and Claymore are unlocked after completing chapter 2 already. It still feels a bit weird to have this rift, but it's nice to have another powerful spear available nevertheless.
All weapons will pale in comparison to the new Longsword of Light, however, which has a base attack value of 30 and is the reward for "Eve of the Final Confrontation", where you're training with Rauru. Unlike your early game encounter, he's not holding back here and blasting you with everything he's got, making him quite the formidable foe. But he will be the only opponent in this mission, where it's one of the shortest late-game Challenges to complete. If you want to grind some pure Zonaite Steel, then this might be the place to do so.
However, if you want to have some fun while grinding, then "In Search of Poes" is my personal recommendation. In fact, it's the first Challenge that I truly enjoy replaying in this game, where it's perfect for some late game farming of EXP and all sorts of rare materials. It reminds me of the "Rack Up Your KO Count" missions from the first Hyrule Warriors, with the difference that you try to collect as many Poes as possible within a time limit of six minutes.
There is only a Flux Construct and a Shade in your way. Defeating them will open some gates and behind them you can find treasure chambers filled with lots and lots of Poes, which is an usual sight. These alone add up to 1500, but you can easily get more than 2000 in a run with all the small Shades that come afterwards. Those also give some good amounts of EXP, because you will be quickly scoring many K.O.s.
You don't want to make the mistake of capturing the outposts in the beginning (like I did the first time) and instead just head right for the Flux Construct with both your characters, so there is enough time left at the end to plow through the field in the north. And since the two stronger foes are by no means demanding, this is perfect for some grinding on the sidelines, e.g. while you're listening to a podcast or watching something else in the background.
Anyway, each run will net you a couple of levels for both characters, around 2000 Poes and 1000 Rupees, as well as one pure Zonaite Steel. The Poes are capped at 9999, so you want to be spending them at the Tusk & Talon after every battle. Just buy them out. You will get some very rare monster parts here and the Monster Extracts can be sold for 20 Rupees each, while they only cost five Poes, so that's a solid way of making some more money.
Finally, the "Struggle for Ash Swamp" is a Challenge that feels like it could have been a whole story scenario. The Ash Swamp battlefield itself also never gets used in one, where this may even be the first time where you can explore all of it at once. So far only parts of it have been used for other Challenges, if I remember correctly.
They also go hard on the enemy counts here, where you can get up to 2000 K.O.s during this mission, making more out of that Switch 2 exclusivity. This is the area where Fort Hateno will be built in the distant future, where the decisive moment against the Guardian army takes place, so it is a rather fitting choice for such a special late-game Challenge, which even puts you against three Phantom Ganons at the end. You can still see a whole mountain in the distance, which will later break apart to become the Dueling Peaks.
And while this scenario doesn't compare to the epic "Siege of Fort Hateno" from Age of Calamity, it is still one of the most interesting Challenges in the game, where some variety like this was much needed. Oh, and it also plays the classic Zelda medley!
Vicious Battles
So much for the normal Challenges... But there is still a whole other category to talk about with the "Vicious Battles", where you have to face overpowered versions of the various enemies in the game. These were also a thing in Age of Calamity, but this got expanded to more enemy types and they don't have the random buffs, where they are now all labeled as "Merciless Tyrants". Should have been "Infuriating Cheats", really.
What makes them so infuriating is that they can erratically burst out dangerous attacks and even chain them, like Ganondorf could. The Vicious Hinox is the craziest example for this. They can do three fast roll attacks in a row and then leap at you afterwards. Their weak point gauges won't get exposed until you have successfully countered all of them. So, this would exhaust the Unique Skills of your entire team in one turn... Which is where you want to bring in the Zonai Devices, because they are more readily available without even switching between your fighters. In case of the Vicious Hinox you want to be using Rockets and Cannons.
But the strategy will differ for each of these mutated monsters. It gets especially bad when there is more than one to fight at once, like in case of the Moblins and Captain Constructs. Both can shoot beams at you that hit super hard and they can fire multiple ones in a row. Since there are no invincibility frames for you in this game, you can easily die being caught up in one of the beams bursts of the Captain Constructs. It's insane.
It also doesn't help when your characters will suddenly drop to low health after switching to them. I don't know what causes this and it's very rare, but normally your idle fighters shouldn't take any damage. I think it may only happen when they get separated, kind of like the soldiers that you need to rescue from time to time...
Anyway, the base game has eight of the Vicious Battles: Shade, Stone Talus, Moblins, Boss Bokoblin, Hinox, Frox and Lynel. You would think that the Lynel is by far the worst of them, but it's really not. It's the Moblins and Captain Constructs.
Now, the update has added six more of these battles, but only three new vicious monsters: Bokoblins, Sludge Like and Flux Construct. These were all more or less fair, where I expected the Sludge Like to be hell with how much trouble it had given me in the past, but it was okay. Worst ones were the multiple Bokoblins, who can jump attack so quickly that it's very hard to react to them. You can't shield them either and they remove half of my health (around 15 hearts) with a single strike. It's ridiculous.
To make things worse, all the normal Bokoblins become vicious as well and also leap very quickly at you for some tough damage. It's super frustrating. But the worst was yet to come...
The three additional Vicious Battles don't introduce any new variants (even though they had plenty of options left), but they combine the existing ones in evil ways. A Vicious Boss Bokoblin with multiple Vicious Bokoblins, and a Vicious Flux Construct with two Vicious Captain Constructs will await you. And this is where things are getting truly frustrating
Koei Tecmo must have heard the complaints about how easy this game is, which is mostly due to how many offensive options you have during battle. And their answer is to throw lots of bullshit at you once, so that even all these options may not be enough any longer. It's not fun and with how much damage you take it rivals the shenanigans of the original Twilight Princess Adventure Map in Hyrule Warriors for the Wii U. Those are some bad memories and it was a good thing that they have nerfed this hard in later versions of the game...
The worst offender is the third of them, however, the Vicious Battle at South Hyrule Field. I don't know what they were thinking with this one... This Challenge is so damn frustrating and unfair, I'd rather go back to Silksong to play a certain mini-game there. I even thought that this might be the end of my Very Hard run, that I couldn't do this without lowering the difficulty setting. But I bested it eventually.
It begins harmless enough. There is one Vicious Bokoblin and one Vicious Moblin, with some distance between the two, so you can focus on a single Bokoblin for a change. But this feeling won't last... Once you start attacking the Moblin, it will call out for reinforcements of more vicious monsters, including another Moblin, where these reinforcements won't stop until you've defeated both Moblins. And then you still have to defeat a small army of Vicious Bokoblins afterwards. And this is brutal.
I've tried different methods. I've tried singling them out and fighting them one by one as they approach. I've tried fighting them all at once. It didn't matter, so or so I've ended up with eight vicious monsters in total, two Moblins and six Bokoblins, completely wrecking me with their onslaught of fast, devastating attacks from all angles, making this a near-impossible task.
And it's not like you can just ignore this mission for completion. Unlike in Age of Calamity, these Vicious Battles don't rotate on some random basis. They are fixed Challenges and count towards your 100% map completion, even the ones added via the update.
This was one of the few times in the game where I really had to strategize and think about which characters to bring into battle, especially for the Sync Strikes. Singling the Bokoblins out didn't work too well, because it makes the battle take way too long and creates more room for error. You only get Checkpoints after the initial Bokoblin and then after each Moblin, where you want them as a fallback.
Ideally, your Sync Strikes (and Special Attacks) are hitting as many of them at once as possible. And the center of the battlefield has two bodies of water, which are there for you to go wild with elemental chains. Calamo is the best character for this, because with his Strong Attack you can easily create multiple elemental storms in a row. Drop a Shock or Frost Emitter into the water and then spam the X for some effective tornadoes.
I mostly went with the Shock Emitter, because it makes them slow down more quickly than the ice. However, freezing them lets you cause more damage if you shatter them with bombs afterwards. But I also brought Ardi, where her main purpose was to trigger Sync Strikes with Calamo's bud. That attack is absolutely insane and lets you blast through the weak point gauges of the entire group:
This was really the winning combo. And Qia was only there to keep Calamo alive. So, whenever I got the chance I would get him to sync with her and then run around for a bit to get some hearts back.
Well, it's great that there is a Challenge to talk about, but I honestly hope that they won't add any more of these unfair clusterfogs to the game. Bad DLC can always ruin a good game for completionists and this honestly has lowered my overall enjoyment. The single Vicious Battles are challenging enough, but they at least feel still fair, where they should just focus on giving us some of the missing variants, e.g. a Vicious Molduga.
Weapon Building
Whatever the type, they will certainly add more Challenges with the next update, given how the new ones only range from levels 81 to 85, which is a bit odd. And in the meantime you might want to prepare by leveling your characters to the max and build some powerful weapons. This is just to make the game last longer and make you feel good about filled out numbers, because with the seemingly tight damage caps and floors in place (this is only my impression, I haven't done any value testing), none of this will make a bigger difference.
The weapon building is also a very tedious affair. To be fair, they have improved a couple of things from Age of Calamity. Most importantly, weapons don't have variable base damage. Once you've obtained a weapon, you can be certain that you won't find a stronger version of it later on, so you can proceed to enhance this weapon right away. You won't find many duplicates at all, in fact, where instead weapons get upgraded via Zonaite Steel.
There are also many more fixed weapons this time, while Age of Calamity really only had two. Calamo, Rauru and all the sages only get exactly one weapon and stay on it for the rest of the game. They don't have any stronger tiers or whatever, so you can safely invest into them from the beginning on.
Boosting a weapon to Level 10 is also reasonable enough. However, it becomes unreasonable once you've raised the level cap of a weapon to 15 or even 20. The amounts of Zonaite Steel required here become astronomical and clearing any Challenge for a second time will only give you one piece of steel, which is nothing. You can use amiibo to obtain some more Zonaite Steel on a daily basis (or more often when changing the clock on your Switch 2), but I have yet to receive any pure steel from it. And the normal steel gives far too little weapon EXP, so it isn't really worth the trouble.
Seals work similarly to how they did in Age of Calamity, so you want to have four in the same shape and two more in a second shape for the best damage bonus. However, there is only one regular square shape seal in this game and it shortens the loading of charge attacks. That isn't a bad skill, but only few characters make stronger use of charge attacks, like Typhan. Many don't have any charge attacks at all.
You also get special seals at levels 7 and 20. The one at 20 is the hidden seal, which also used to be a thing in the previous game. But there can now also be "weapon arts", which are chosen at random, except for the eight fixed weapons and some special weapons, like the new Longsword of Light. The latter gives you an additional Special Attack gauge, so you can have up to four, which would be useful if Special Attacks hadn't taken the backseat to Sync Strikes in this game.
The weapon arts can be still quite good, though. For example, there is one that lets you heal from causing damage. It's the one you get by default for Ardi (I've mentioned it before). Or you can get a stat boost after performing a counter. But these are the exception and the majority is garbage, making it utterly annoying that you can only reroll them at random. It costs a lot of materials to do so and you might end up with just another garbage seal. You can save scum this, but it's still just wasting your time. With how much it costs you should be able to pick the weapon art you want. And Koei Tecmo must know by now that people are going to save & reload with such random nonsense...
If you want to know more details, check out GameFAQs. They have a very dedicated topic about this with a list of all possible seals and weapon arts, which even can be recognized by their materials before unlocking them.
While building perfect weapons in the Hyrule Warriors games can be very satisfying, it's never worth the trouble and I probably won't be doing it here either. In my opinion, it is still the best in Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition, but there you will automatically do it at the sidelines when you are playing the very lengthy Adventure Mode. In Age of Calamity and Imprisonment the game will be over before you even have finished even a single weapon. It's that nonsensical how much time and effort required to do this.
All Clear
At least it's satisfying to have cleared the entire map at the end, turning all the red areas into green ones. Curiously, there is a defense challenge, "A Flash of Steel in the Desert", which has a recommended level of 32, but doesn't unlock after you've beaten a Vicious Battles in the post-game (the one with the Hinox), blocking the respective territory. That didn't make any sense.
It would be nice if the game had some rotating battles going on, like the Vicious Monster Battles in Age of Calamity. Maybe it could be some new type of territory defending. There also is no equivalent to the Blood Moon mechanic, which let you replay story scenarios on a higher level, but many of the scenarios are under a Blood Moon already, so they would have to think of something else...
By the way, the new Challenges and Quests from the update have a plus sign on their icons on the map and don't count towards the 100% area completions for Lenalia's sketches. Which is good, so no one has to force themselves through these horrible new Vicious Battles to unlock the secret credits.
These extra credits depict all the events in the game in the drawn style of the murals, which got beautifully animated. I really loved it! However, Age of Calamity had a similar secret ending, which was given a bit earlier. And as the final reward you got a special armor set for Link... Again, this shows that the post-game isn't as sophisticated as it was in the previous title.
But let's see what they will be cooking up with the second update... I will post my expectations about it tomorrow. And I will continue this series with at least one more entry when the rest of the (free) DLC has arrived.
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