Age of Imprisonment – Datamine Insights

The remake of Ocarina of Time isn't the only game under X-rays since the Switch 2 floodgates got bombed wide open, where a few people also looked into the last installment of the Hyrule Warriors series, Age of Imprisonment.

It started with TM02 on October 26th, but nothing much came out of it, except for some artwork renders we didn't have access to yet. But yesterday a video by Gaming Reinvented came up, where they had a deeper look and found some interesting discoveries. Here is their summary from reddit:

• Every character has dialogue for switching to Ganondorf, Sonia and the Forbidden Construct
• DLC is explicitly mentioned
• Icons exist for all Gleeok types, Like Like types and Battle Taluses
• Text references exist to all Wizzrobe types as well as Training Constructs and the above enemies
• Unused items exist as Gleeok and Like Like drops
• There's unused text indicating there were meant to be optional sky battles, including with the unused Gleeok types
• Colgera has a model in game for some reason
• Other models include the Spring of Courage, mummy Ganondorf, the Room of Awakening and the Shrine of Resurrection (many are leftovers)
• Construct Heads were meant to be Zonai parts

Well, the flight missions were a lot of fun, so it would have been nice to have more of them and even all of the different Gleeok types, with the King Gleeok as the final flight boss. That's a loss.

But the most interesting part here are the name calls, which indicate that Sonia, Ganondorf and even the Forbidden Construct were planned to playable at some point. The same was also true for Astor in Age of Calamity, where a similar voice clip for him got discovered as well, but this here is much more extensive and complete.

Storywise, none of these additions make much sense, but they could have been planned as bonus characters that you get to unlock in the post-game, similar to how Age of Calamity did it. I personally was hoping that they might add Sonia as part of the free updates last year, and that Ganondorf may receive his own, separate DLC campaign, but neither were to happen... 

And that's a shame. The game felt certainly rushed with how its free updates filled some rather obvious gaps. And maybe it underperformed in either Koei Tecmo's and Nintendo's eyes, which is why they decided against further updates and DLC. But it had passed one million copies and it was also released in a tough spot, being the first Zelda-related exclusive on the Nintendo Switch 2. The majority of Zelda fans have probably waited for Ocarina of Time and may give the game a chance now...