Expansion Pass Progress
- Difficulty: Very Hard
- EX Battles: 8 (Completed)
- EX Research Quests: 35 / 35
- EX Quests: 77
- EX Challenges: 26
Well, this is it, at least for now. I'm done with the game again with all Quests and Challenges completed, where the DLC really didn't add too much. Most of the play time after my previous post went into figuring out the secret Memory Quests and then there isn't really much anything left to do, other than the usual grinding. But more on these topics a little later.
Spoiler warning: If you don't know who the unannounced third DLC character is and still want to find out for yourself, then you will have to stop reading right now. I'm not turning this into some ultra secret, like I did with the final base game character. If you're looking for help to solve all the Memory Quests, then check out my updated summary post, where you can find a spoiler-free solution.
Anyway, moving on, you've been warned...
Intervention Inventions
While replaying the new scenarios and also grinding some more Vicious Monster Battles, I've been using Purah & Robbie quite a lot. I love this new character, it's a really great addition. The range is enormous, while Robbie doesn't have such a massive hitbox as some of the other larger fighters. And any hits on Purah don't subtract from your life energy, she's basically an invulnerable dummy and can even be used to block some enemy attacks, though it somewhat feels wrong to "abuse" her like that. But it's also hilarious when she gets flipped all over the place without a scratch.
The real deal are the "inventions", however, which you can place with your ZR ability whenever the meter has refilled, which happens quite quickly. Not only are these some of the biggest area attacks in the game, they reveal weak points and eat away the gauge like crazy. It's like you're getting access to deployable Special Attacks all the time.
This ability is insane and really helps with groups of stronger enemies, which is why I've been playing them happily in the Vicious Monster Battles. It's probably my favorite of all the DLC movesets, because it's so versatile. The other one in this DLC wave comes close, however, but for different reasons...
But no matter how good the character is, one thing will always be devastating and those are archer attacks. I've probably mentioned this before, but I have to do this again: the lack of any invulnerability frames for your character is not okay. If you get hit by ten arrows within half a second, because a group of archers or Lizalfos is spamming at you, that's ten hearts down when one arrow causes one heart of damage. And this can cause some surprise Game Overs when you're getting hit by such a rapid fire attack that you can't even heal yourself in time. But that's just a side note, unrelated to the topic of new fighters. This can happen to anyone, even the best.
Mystery Memory
Okay, the obscured Memory Quests were absolutely dumb and I've wasted so much time figuring out what the game wants me to do, stuck in a frustrating replay loop of my own wrong assumptions, that this sincerely dampened the enjoyment of this last bit of DLC.
In theory it's a nice idea, but in praxis there shouldn't have been a character unlock tied to this and ideally these mystery quests are something that you can figure out yourself by observing the map, listening to the dialogues and exploring. And to be fair, this is the case for a majority of these secret missions. But it's a real problem for the ones where it's not. Three of them gave me some real trouble, where I've spent the entirety of two evenings playing them over and over again without a real clue
The first one is "EX Battle for Kakariko Village" and here I have to admit that my thorough way of playing was getting in the way. My first instinct was that this was about the many open enemy outposts all around Kakariko Village, but capturing them yourself doesn't do anything, so I assumed that it had to be something else. And since capturing them early prevents the many waves of enemies flooding into Kakariko, it gave me the necessary time to explore all of the stages for any other secrets. So, I've kept doing that out of convenience, all while being confused about what I actually had to do...
For a while I even thought it must have something to do with the Great Fairy pond. Maybe you're supposed to call her for help to fight Sooga or something, as a throwback to the first Hyrule Warriors? It's not like I knew what the game wanted me to do...
After a while the realization came that I had to do things differently and the most obvious thing was to stop capturing all the outposts. When I first played the mission I was so focused on defending Kakariko from the swarming enemies, because this was another Memory Quest, that I never even bothered switching to Daruk, so I didn't know that you could capture the outposts with Vah Rudania. Hence the confusion about what to do. Playing a scenario for the first time can be a little bit overwhelming, where I'm not paying attention to everything. But on my repeat playthroughs I was just too thorough for my own good.
The hidden Memory Quest in "EX Liberate the Ancient Lab" was by far the worst, because here I just had no clue at all. I've played this scenario a dozen of times without a single idea what could be the secret mission here. It was really bad and I became desperate eventually. I thought that maybe you had to defeat many enemies with lightning attacks, because there is a similar Memory Quest at Goponga Village and you're originally playing as Urbosa and Riju. With that also came the thought that the condition may be tied to a specific character, but that would be mean, because there are no fixed characters after beating the battle once. So, they wouldn't possibly do this. Right? Riiiiight...?
Since you can use any character to replay the scenario, I mostly played whoever I liked best, where Purah and Robbie were usually my first choice. They were the new hot thing, after all... But this way I could have searched forever, because the super secret mission expects you to defeat Kohga with Riju. How are you supposed to know this? When I first played the scenario, I defeated him with Urbosa, simply because I'm more comfortable with her in boss fights. And since I didn't HAVE to use Riju for anything, it hasn't occurred to me that she was necessary for anything until much, much later. What an annoyance...
But the real tragedy lies in "EX The Yiga Clan's Retreat", where this is probably the most "obvious" one out of the three. Kohga makes a big fuss about not leaving anyone behind and I've been replaying the mission with Mipha specifically because of this to keep everyone healed and happy. However, there is the one guy who closes a gate behind him to purposefully sacrifice himself, where the gate normally doesn't open until he gets defeated by the Hollows. And I've kept assuming this was part of the script and you couldn't do anything about it. So, I thought it had to be something else, like getting to the end really fast, capturing all the keeps, not using the Sheikah Slate and other nonsense. I had lots of ideas, but I also never could be really sure what to do, where you're always in doubt.
Well, it turned out that you can actually open the gate to the guy who stays behind at a specific point during the battle, when the Hollows appear. There is this tiny window where you can actually save him and with that finally solve the puzzle. And when you do so, you can suddenly play as Sooga... You unlock the man.
This was the hardest facepalm moment for me in the entire game. When I first played this scenario I was convinced that this had to be the place where you unlock Sooga. And when for some reason this didn't happen, I was just so very disappointed. You should have seen my sad face last Saturday. He was my "most wanted" for the DLC and I was convinced that it had to be him, but at that point it just didn't look like it any longer and I simply assumed that he wasn't going to be playable after all. Maybe Koei Tecmo came up with some other great idea of who is going to be the character, like Malice Dumpster Ganon... You can never really be sure about these things and I was kind of nervous what all of this would finally lead to.
This could have been avoided if unlocking him wasn't tied to some obscure condition. Or if said condition wasn't obscured. I probably wouldn't even complain about these secret Memory Quests so much, if they were just treated as this 100% bonus and didn't prevent you from getting the last fighter. Well, technically Sooga isn't even the last fighter, because you can unlock him even before Purah & Robbie... And I would have loved getting him right there at this point, without any shenanigans, just like any of the other characters you get from the story scenarios. Or if the game simply told me to protect all allies, then this wouldn't have been an issue as well. But no, it had to say "???". Thanks, Koei Tecmo... This was really not fun.
Supah Sooga
While the path to unlocking Sooga wasn't the happiest one for me, finally playing as him makes up for it. I loved Koei Tecmo's original characters for Hyrule Warriors, especially Cia, and Sooga is my favorite one in Age of Calamity. Sorry, Terrako, but you're just an R2D2 rip-off... Of course Sooga also nails a certain stereotype – the reliable and disciplined henchman who secretly runs the organization for his master, who on the other hand is incredibly incompetent. But there is just something about him that works so very well in contrast to the goofy Kohga.
You really have to give it to Koei Tecmo, they know how to stage characters. Kohga was just this one mini-boss encounter in Breath of the Wild and they've added so much to his person, it's absolutely incredible. And Sooga is a big part of this, where it's always a highlight when he appears.
It's so good that he's finally playable and he does not disappoint, at least for the most part. His ZR gimmick is a counter, which is such a good move that you'd wish that this became a thing for every character in the game. It's a solid alternative to dodging, where you can even keep up combos after a successful counter.
One of the biggest struggles with the whole battle system of Age of Calamity is that the game is quick to punish you for carelessly attacking while fighting bosses. It's always best to play it safe and should you start a combo when it's not, then pray to the Goddesses that Mr. Lynel isn't about to strike you. But with Sooga you can actually risk it more thanks to his counter, which is great and a fun mechanic.
And his Special Attack is dope, it's the coolest animation in the entire game. The music stops, the visuals are all turned into black and white, all so that Sooga can do his red slash in style. Awesome, I love it. The only downer here is that it seems that Sooga doesn't really use any wind beams in his moveset, where this is actually his signature move and also that of Yiga Blademasters in general. Some of the weapon effects look similar, but they don't travel as far, where his moveset could have been even better with some more range.
There are apparently no restrictions to using Sooga in the scenarios, where you can go and fight Sooga as Sooga in many of the missions. But this also already worked as Kohga. Speaking of, they've also updated the DLC Challenge from last time where you play as the baddies, "EX Conquering Hyrule", so that you can now also play as Sooga. Very nice. For me personally this makes this Challenge so much easier to play, so that it's actually quite fun. And when grinding rod and apple refills on "Nap Quest!" Kohga now finally has the perfect partner for the job.
After obtaining all 21 characters the character select screens all look a little weird, though. There is always enough space to show all of the icons, but for some reason they decided to make it a panel that scrolls, where the character(s) on the last row are faded out at the beginning. And it just looks amateurish.
The End?
With everything cleared once more, I'm feeling a little unsatisfied. There simply wasn't that much to do in the Expansion Pass, especially when compared to the DLCs for Hyrule Warriors and Hyrule Warriors: Legends, where the additional Adventure Maps could keep you busy for countless hours. This isn't the case here. Well, the content certainly has more quality to it, where the existence of new stages alone is so much more interesting than anything Hyrule Warriors did with its DLCs besides adding more fighters. But at the same time these new stages don't really get used much.
So, this is a quality over quantity case, but with the addition of the two new characters, which are both really fun, I kind of want to keep playing. And the only options here are weapon grinding and playing through the game again on its "Apocalyptic" difficulty, which shouldn't make any difference until the higher recommended levels. But that's probably better than nothing at all.
Weapon grinding still puts me off, however. There is so much that you can do in Hyrule Warriors to build "perfect" weapons, but there is nothing really to use them at the end. The only weapons that I consider as part of 100% completion are the Master Sword and Bow of Light, because those are fixed. Everything that can potentially be sold or lost in any way doesn't count, even if you would never do so.
Getting the best possible base weapon damage for the normal tier 3 weapons also seems to be a massive pain after this DLC. This can be as high as 84 now (88 with Octo-polished weapons) and the only way of getting those is beating the new boss in the new Lv. 93 Challenge. And that's not a fun or quick mission to be playing over and over again. If the "EX Alert" Challenges could give these best possible weapons, I might consider doing it, because they at least offer some good variety, but there is no way I'm putting myself through playing the same painful Challenge again and again
With that in mind, the new special weapons for the Champions and their descendants are interesting, because they are a one-time offer and you can't get better versions of them at random. They work exactly like the Prototype Ancient Short Sword, which was the Expansion Pass bonus and has its own special growth rate, which is pretty good. So, you're free to work on them right away and I've already started upgrading them.
But there really should be a way of re-obtaining all these special weapons somehow. Same with the Training Sword and Lucky Ladle. If you fuse or sell these weapons, you can't get them back, which is stupid. A game like this shouldn't have anything that is lost forever. Why can't I just do the quests a second time? It works for the Flail and Master Cycle at the Royal Ancient Lab and it should be the same here.
Generally, there are so many things that they still could add to the game, like all the missing costumes, golden enemies, or even more fighters, that I feel like we might be getting a second Expansion Pass. But more on that in a separate post. I'm not holding my breath here, because we're talking about Nintendo, who loves nothing more than to leave potential unfulfilled. But it's still a possibility that this might happen next year as another way to pass time until the sequel to Breath of the Wild.
